response to Nancy

Let's face it, facebook is just too damn friendly and positive, it's no place for crusty, antagonistic people like me (but not you dear Nancy!). In all seriousness, you're right, to be a "fan" of a brand or other entity (I'm apparently a fan of an NGO and a blogging network), makes no sense. The platform is struggling with numbers it seems. There are lots of reports now about getting 'timed out' notices for too much cruising around Facebook, or refusals of facebook to send out notices to groups that have over 1000 members. So while this represents a certain clumsiness on the part of an exponentially growing platform, the issue for me is one of framing -- where can we indicate our curiosity, frustration, deep antipathy, or apathy? While at AoIR I bumped into an old nemesis from my undergrad days, an enemy of sorts lets say. But hell, he was a significant person in my life... but why is there no language here (or in some of the more vocal academic work on social networking) about networks that include such figures in ones past or present...this fella was way more important to me than 95% of my facebook friends -GE