Normals and the things they say on Facebook
I learned a couple of interesting things this morning.
The first thing is that Will Moffat built a tool called Facebook Search. It allows you to search status messages from Facebook. Oh yeah, didn't you know? Unless you change the default setting, your Facebook status messages are public, and searchable. Will has kindly offered up some one click searches for us. Go see who's talking about playing hooky, their stupid boss, their rectal exam, or enter your own search. Genital warts returns some interesting stuff. He also provides a bit of education for those who want to get out of the stream. The second thing is a new term; 'normals'. Not to be confused with Norml.org , 'normals' are essentially that part of the population that follows the default, without questioning it. The non-geek among us who for example wouldn't be aware of the privacy implications of Facebook's settings for their personal accounts. I first heard the term on a Hacker News discussion about Will's Facebook Search tool. If you are one who builds apps, considers user experiences, or does any kind of marketing via social media; normals are people you'd be wise to research and understand. Both in terms of what motivates them to act, and also in terms of what they understand and don't understand about the technology you're asking them to use.
