Facebook streamlining it all

Facebook might be hurting the already tiny circulation numbers of the campus weekly at my small liberal arts alma mater, but it sure did streamline one thing: getting in touch with people. Before Facebook (dark ages for colleges, I’m sure), contacting a source meant calling a dorm phone line that often wasn’t even hooked up to a phone or sending email to an email address that might not be checked more than once a week. It was awful.

These days — after Facebook — connecting to a source means sending a Facebook message. Finding out club officers means a quick look at a group page. Even obtaining photographs is streamlined — just go see if anyone’s posted any, then ask for permission to reprint them. Bang. Boom.

Of course this doesn’t scale well outside the walled garden of academia, but it is a sign of the usefulness of these social networking sites. They take all kinds of information that used to be spread out and hard to find and make it easy and accessible and centralized. The Google of people? You bet. Of course, it doesn’t help with the real work of interviewing and digging and writing, but it helps to automate some of the mindless chores of finding contact info and setting up interviews.

Case in point: I’m doing a story package for my alma mater’s alumni mag on a film an alum wrote and produced with a bunch of current students and other alumni. Before Facebook, tracking down contact info for all involved and then calling them would have been a chore. Today, I just joined the film’s discussion group and Facebooked them. Easy as pie.