Facebook Worlds

I've been on facebook for perhaps a year.   Just recently I've been stepping back and trying to understand the larger view.   By the way, I'm not an expert and don't really understand the architecture of the whole thin.

Each facebook person has his/her own world.   It's defined by your own posts, and the posts of your friends.    Custom facebook.   So your home page is a page made up of your posts and the posts of these friends.   Now your friends all see their own world which is similarly constructed, their own custom world.  Now if you want to see a friend's page (or world) you can link to it, but different security settings control how much you see.   So if my son allows me as a friend to see his page, I will see halves of conversations he is having....the half from the other person (2 degrees away from me) but not his half of the conversation.   You also see tracks of the person 2 degrees away if they have tagged a person in a picture and that person is a friend of yours.

Anyway without the technical terms, that's how it looks to me.    What's fascinating is the construct of these custom worlds, each one different and defined   It's feels like sliding universes  that touch at a few points, but mostly exist as separate entities.   Now imagine if some of your friends are friends,  then you and they will see parts of the same posts. Now there's more connection.

As to myself, I find that I have several different sets of friends:   my actual friends, my kids and their friends who choose to friend me, an environmental grouping in Morgantown, a worldwide accordion group, my various families, a group I went to high school with, and a sailing/boating group.   I get to follow all of them, but they  are basically unaware of each other.   Then I think about multiplying this experience by the millions on facebook...the creation of all these person centered universes or networks.   Pretty amazing when you step back and look at it.

Benny - let me know if I have this wrong!