Chapter 7. Streams

In This Chapter

  • Finding out what your friends are up to right now

  • Reading about interesting things that have been going on lately

  • Telling people about your recent life history

  • Finding recent information about a topic in which you're interested

Reaching out to all the friends you care about to find out what's going on in their lives is a lot of work; in fact, it's too much. Similarly, it's a lot of repetitive work to have to tell everyone you know about what you are up to. Facebook's mission is to help you connect and communicate with the people you care about. The Facebook model requires each of us to be responsible for forming our connections, and then updating our Profiles with news in our lives. Our individual streams of information pour into the greater collective of information and sharing, from which we each can learn about what's going on around us.

In this chapter, we focus on the information streams on Facebook, starting with the stream each of us generates for our friends. Then we talk about the greater social stream consisting of all the information contributed by our friends and the people around us. We finish up wading into the global stream of information in which we can learn about the particular recent topics that interest us.

Going to the Wall

When you first meet someone new, generally you find yourself spouting off the pieces of information that live on your Info tab: your name, where you live, what you do, how many kids you have, and maybe where you ...

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