Want to wear pieces of flair like a waiter at Chotchkie’s? There’s a Facebook application for that. Want to throw virtual sheep at your friends? There’s an app for that. Want to share with the world which Sex and the City character you are?
You get the idea. And if you do want to do any of those things, more power to you, but I won’t be joining you. That’s not to say I’m down on Facebook apps; in fact I just found a great one called Nexus that has me fascinated and somewhat spooked.
Nexus analyzes your network of Facebook friends (and frenemies), and maps out everyone as a series of lines and dots (I hasten to add for the benefit of all the math teachers I ever had, that these are properly called edges and nodes). Each dot represents a person; each line a relationship. Here’s what mine looks like:
Here’s where it gets spooky: Each grouping of dots represents something about me, some stage of my life — high school, college, that job, this job, etc.
Even within the groups of dots, there are subgroups that map perfectly to real-life connections. This is kind of information some of us fear businesses and governments getting their hands on, but Facebook already has it. It makes me fear Facebook knows me better than I know myself.
What do you think?