...you might also like Genocide.
Recommendations are a old as humanity, the blogster is certain. Couldn't that explain the congregation of a variety of animals under Marulca trees or other trees whose fallen fruit ferments and produces alcohol?
A couple of decades into the internet, we are seeing product recommendations on every visit to online shopping sites or whenever we look at our Twitter inbox or rummage around on Facebook.
If you apply the logic of the cynical dictum that users of a free service "are the product", ** then your Twitter "Follow" suggestions are product recommendations, just like those for books, lawn furniture or condoms. Question: do product recommendations for condoms really exist?
Let's assume for the moment that the know-it-all catchphrase You are the product is true for free services. At that point, we can begin to discuss product quality in order to take a deeply satisfying swipe at Facebook and call it the Social Media Disneyland with integrated Junk Yard.
In their relentless yet futile quest for real names, they have pretty much alienated every definable group of users, from native Americans to gays, from Muslims to atheists, from astrologers to physicists. The blogster would really love to know if German Mr. Keiner ("None", that preferred placeholder in so many form input fields) or Mrs. Unverzagt ("Undaunted") have Facebook accounts.
If users are products, how do define product quality? Are Twitter users with the default egg and a pseudonym the kind of products you can get at swap meets, often of dubious provenance, dusty, rusty, leaky, scratched or dented, with a few stunning bargains in between?
The ad model, of which recommendations and suggestions are a subset in the opinion of some, with its roots in print and radio and TV, has been taken up by the online world without much change.
One reason for that is the old categories did prove their value over time, and companies know how to do the needed metrics. A second reason are external requirements, such as legal restrictions on advertising of alcohol or tobacco. Yet, online ads do not have to be as well targeted as TV ads with their 30 second spots during the Super Bowl going for obscene amounts of money.
Ads don't worry the blogster much. They can be a nuisance, they can be entertaining, and some are even useful. But as long as Google does not get within a range of ten years of the blogster's true age and doesn't get the gender right, it is okay.
What is much more disturbing is the prospect of news or feature articles being preselected based on opaque criteria and/or social media connections.
For new readers: the blogster's view on real identity on the web is simple. It should be a choice. This entails a trade off because the blogster's posts and tweets cannot be readily evaluated based on resume snippets or a photo of a person and therefore tend to have less weight - which is totally fine.
Not to be outdone, we offer a couple of recommendations of our own!
If you are worried your Twitter "Following" list might tell the world too much about your political, sexual, or book tastes, you might want to add a good mix of accounts you are not interested in at all and simply put those on "Mute".
If you like this post, you might also like to take a day or two off of social media.
** The condescending "ah, you don't want to pay money for services, you pay with your information" is really fucked up because the picture is not much different for paid services. Lots take your money and your information on top of it.
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