The weirdlight of my weekend

[eclectic_boy]

Swarthmore Alumni Council met this weekend, and felt more productive than past meetings, but still tinged with oddnesses. The big one came this morning, when there was a discussion of whether and how to create a Swat alums online dating service. Happily, it was soon agreed that something broader in scope, that facilitated meeting new (and catching up with old) friends as well as dating, was a better goal -- I'm glad we consensed that helping a larger percentage of alumni was a better use of time & effort.

But then the real weird moment came, when one Alumni Office person gave a presentation to the group about existing software that might suffice instead of creating something new... and showed off Facebook. The people at the meeting ranged from class of around '97 to around '54, and none of them knew of facebook, or had ever heard of anything like it (except for me). It was more than amusing to watch, and to listen to: "gosh, it's that easy?" "you can tell people so much about yourself!" "looking for 'Random play'? '...Whatever I can get'??"
I've been on facebook for a year or so (though I don't use it very much); looking at the age distribution of people on it there seems to be a sharp dropoff when you get farther back than about class of '01, and I don't know of a single other person on it from near '88, my year. But it sure wowed the Alumni Council group that saw it, and I'm wondering how many of them will be joining soon... and whether there'll be a push to get all alumni to join. And whether facebook would be changed by the acquisition of hundreds or thousands of Swarthmore alumni from decades past.

Comments

the facebook

[crystalpyramid]

I like that. It's suitably non-elitist and non-Swarthmore, such that it's not aggressively perpetuating the Quaker matchbox, and won't be administered by ITS. The facebook is so nice because it's a means of keeping in touch with people, matching names to faces, rather than an online dating service — though I'm sure there are people who do use it as a dating service. I think it would be really cool if lots of alumni — not just from Swarthmore, but from everywhere, showed up on the facebook, and it would probably kind of bewilder the creators. I like how it blurs distinctions of current student vs. alum, faculty vs. student (simply by putting them all in one forum), and connects all the colleges.

We mentioned the facebook to my Russian teacher in conversation class last week, and she asked us to look up a guy she went to college with, who's now a physics professor somewhere. As predicted, he was on the facebook, as faculty. We were all pretty impressed that she'd been able to predict that he'd be on it, and that he was.

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

Swat should give a little $$$ to the Facebook team if they do.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

I think the alumni dating network is a FINE plan.

[andele.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the Constitution prohibits laws--or meeting your future wife on college-sponsored online alumni dating sites--ex post facto.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

I should point out that the Facebook has a really awful privacy policy. Note in particular the following provisions:

We use the information about you that we have collected from other sources to supplement your profile unless you specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done.

We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.

In other words, you will be data-mined. This should hardly be a surprise — it's the Facebook's entire business model: Lure the nation's best and brightest by offering them each other, and then sell them. Of course, these days we are all selling our personal information left and right anyway, but (IANAL) I'm not sure the Swat Alumni Council should encourage alums to entrust their personal information to an entity whose use of said information is not constrained by a contractual relationship with the College.

Certainly, if Swat does this, it should not give the facebook team any $$$ — why should we pay them to take our valuable personal information?

[wayman.livejournal.com]

If they don't have any clue that the internet can be as easy as facebook (livejournal, etc), then can we really expect them to have a clue what data mining is and why it's undesirable? Jim, save us!

[metasilk.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of FaceBook.

I think I missed my chance for Quaker matchbox. Not that I didn't try at the time... ;P

[crystalpyramid]

Bryn Mawr's apparently got an online alumni community called "Athena's Web". It might be worth asking someone who can log into it what that's like.