Prelude To Innovations in Motion

It sickens me that Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite are so high there on the list. The only redeeming thing about this Pulse is that it shows that the University of Michigan has slightly better taste than the rest of the Info Sucking Facebook. Lost makes it on the UM list at number 9, and not on the Entire Facebook top 10 at all. Also, the UM movie top 10 features Shawshank Redemption, a completely respectable choice.

However, the whole thing just shows me how people are throwing away a great chance at creating a good view of what a college student is today. They just pump in every movie and every band they have ever seen or listened to instead of restricting it to their real favorites. No one can have 27 favorites bands. At the most, maybe 10, but that is unrealistic. Movies, of course, you could have more than one favorite, but not more than 10. Maybe one in each genre, but there is always one over all the others you would rather watch.

Overall, every person on the Facebook, excluding me, has contributed to creating the most homogeneous aggregation of idiot information ever. Thanks for ruining it, fucking tools.

Furthermore here is another thing i just saw:

1.3% of Michigan loves to watch Shawshank Redemption.

Now, Shawshank Redemption is number 5 of the list of Michigan student's favorite movies. I will consider that people may call it "The Shawshank Redemption" or just spell it wrong (I mean, who can spell anyway when they just a red dotted line below anything these days). The aggregation of data is just meaningless because it accounts that all of the movies people list are equal. However, that is not the case. Personally, the movies I list are mostly all equal for 100% quality rating. On the other hand, the music I list are just a few artists I like.

What does it mean? It means this is just another thing put up by the nice people at Facebook to rake in more advertising dollars instead of really improving the site as a whole. Don't get me wrong, it is a great way to connect people, it has worked much better than Friendster and (ugh) MySpace.

What would be more useful is include an AJAX-enchanced way of rating all the items you list as favorite movies, books, music, and etc. That way the organizing of the items would be quick and responsive and make the overall data more useful. Factor into the Pulse the individual ratings in some kind of equation/algorithm. Also, get some word recognition in there. If people spell something wrong or leave out a "the" in a title it just doesn't work as well. 1.3% of an entire population shouldn't be able to define what number five is on a list of Top 10 movies at the University of Michigan of Facebook users.