Cold Constructs Blog

There’s some feathers being ruffled these days over Facebook’s closed API. They think it’s “bad for the web” because it’s just “like AOL was”. This is strange because AOL was an ISP with its own browser that you had to use. Places like Facebook (”fb”) are just websites. They have no control over your connection nor the browser you use to surf them–they’re two completely different animals.

What the critics are saying is that because apps can only be built for fb and not used anywhere else on the web, this “walled garden” contributes nothing to the advancement of the net as a social system.

Apparently the critics haven’t noticed the massive amount of spam everyone gets every fucking day on their myspace page and blogs, or the freaks and stalkers wandering around looking for fresh meat, or the lack of useful social utilities that keeps me in the know or make it easy for me to reconnect with my college buddies. Facebook is a sign of things to come–we will eventually make the internet a white-list-based network. See, because fb is walled off, I never have to deal with unsolicited messages, spam comments (though Google is doing an excellent job here now), and my lady friends aren’t always being harassed by total strangers, plus fb tells me when something happens in my friends’ lives that they want me to know about.

I want walled gardens because the vast majority of the web is full of shit I don’t want. Without the walls, I don’t have a reliable means to keep that shit off me. Granted, I would prefer to have an open standard that doesn’t dish out ads (as ignorable as fb’s are) that I can augment with someone else’s spiffy app, but that requires a fundamental change in the way we connect to the net. So for now, places like fb and LinkedIn are necessary.

Swarming. Ants do it, as do bees, caribou, fish, birds, and every other lifeform on the planet. They do it to survive, and as time will tell you, it’s extremely effective. But what exactly is it? National Geographic has an excellent article that explains swarming–check it out now. It explains how the aforementioned organisms utilize this simple concept and how we are taking a hint and exploring the possibilities that swarm behavior enables.

We are at a time when we can create accurate models of natural behavior and learn from it all, thanks to our computing capability. We’ve started modeling swarm behavior and we’ve already learned a lot. Towards the end of the article, the author of the article brings us this much-needed insight that we’ve discovered from our analysis and experiments with swarming:

[Studies of swarm behavior] underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.

Behave the way you think others should behave. Chances are, there are many people like you who share your beliefs, and as a combined force, you and those like you change the world one act at a time. The impact becomes more and more apparent the more you take action–whether it’s changing your personal habits to conform to a more sustainable lifestyle, being considerate of those around you, or voting for the leaders you think will be able to handle the situation best. Everything you do has an effect on everyone around you.

You and you alone are at the point where big change begins. Make it happen starting with your own actions! Connect with like-minded people to help coordinate your actions as a powerful collective to make an even greater impact. Global change begins with local action.