Is Facebook the way of the future??

In today's lecture, I stumbled upon what you may call a mini-epithany. Ok, maybe the idea wasn't that grandiose but it wasn't something I had thought of before so to me, that was quite stupendous.

What I'm blathering about by the way is the astonishing link (pardon the pun) between Tim Berners-Lee's intention of the internet to be an environment where all information provided has a connection to other information, and Facebook's photo tagging system. This process of linking, devised by Berners-Lee, is what he calls "Linked Data". A pretty simple concept really which basically means that any one piece of information is linked to another, much in the same way Wikipedia works.

In his TED presentation, Berners-Lee described his anguish at the number of agencies which did not allow such a system to be applied to their information, such as NASA and the US Government. He said that "The really important thing about data is that the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is". He urged large agencies and companies to utilise this system of linked data so that mere folk like us could become more exposed to ALL the information that is available for one topic, rather than just a single document.

So how does this work in with Facebook? How can us uploading our party pics from last Saturday night and tagging every single person help this system of linked data develop?

The answer is really quite simple - it makes us practice. Practice what, you might say? Voyeurism? Stalking? All of these are true in a way but also at the same time, that is in a sense what linked data is about. In the TED presentation again, Tim Berners-Lee's mentioned the ability of linked data to allow us to "browse" certain articles that were connected to the information we had originally come across. Browsing in a sense is really just a watered-down version of stalking if you look at the two definitions side by side:

Browse: to examine casually; skim
Stalk: To pursue by tracking stealthily.

Tagging our friends in photos allows one person to hop from one link to another starting with the image, then looking at who is in the photo and then clicking on the link in that photo which will take them to that person's profile. This is actually a very complicated use of HTML image hyperlinking but what is so fascinating is that Facebook users who are not enrolled in a networked media course, have no idea that they are already employing the basic strategies involved with linked data. This fabulous revelation means that Tim Berners-Lee's may not be as far off from encouraging the world to create linked data as he thinks.

In fact, I'm pretty sure if Tim set up his own Facebook page, he'd have all the linked data he'd ever need.