With Facebook's growing ambition, procrastination is no longer a sin

Baku Weekly, an English language newspaper circulated in Baku, as seen from the title, published an interesting piece back in 2008. Procrastination Blamed on High-Tech, its headline read. In particular, it said:

Excessive use of computers and mobile phones is being blamed by psychologists for turning one in every five people into time wasters, a phenomena that is wrongly being looked upon as a bit of a joke according to Professor J. Ferrari of DePaul University.

Ferrari’s latest study, which is due for publication later this year, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of us are suffer from a condition he calls chronic procrastination, a condition made worse by having too many hi-tech distractions around us.

The professor claims the condition causes a plethora of knock-on effects, including encouraging depression, lowering self-esteem and inducing insomnia, and calls for its recognition as a serious problem which has risen dramatically in recent decades.

Aware of dishonest practices of some Baku journalists, I did a quick search and found the above content in one news aggregate, and original article in the Guardian, summary of which it was.

However at the moment, this is not my point. All I want just to say - procrastination is no longer a sin now. Millions of users have flocked to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, and the world seems OK with it. The Internet is no longer consists of static or updated websites from where you get informed about useful and useless things. The Internet is now a parallel world, where people continue to exist besides their existence in real world. As described in Time magazine this January, this is how an ordinary Internet user should look like nowadays:

Jenny has not returned my calls in roughly a year. She has, however, sent me a poinsettia, poked me and placed a gift beneath my Christmas tree. She's done all this virtually, courtesy of Facebook, the social-networking site on which users create profiles, gather "friends" and join common-interest groups, not to mention send digital gifts. Although Jenny has three children, ages 4 to 14, and rarely finds time for visits, phone calls or even e-mail, the full-time mom in upstate New York regularly updates her status on Facebook ("Jenny is fixing a birthday dinner," "Jenny took the kids sledding") and uploads photos (her son in the school play). After 24 years, our friendship is now relegated to the online world, filtered through Facebook. Call it Facebook Recluse Syndrome — and Jenny is far from the site's only social hermit.

Yes, as the Washington Post recently noted, Facebook has "a genius in harnessing the collective procrastination of an entire planet." However, those procrastinators who thought of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks as ceilings of online happiness were totally wrong. Because earthly (or rather Internetly) heaven of procrastination is still to come. Thanks to Facebook again.

Recently, Facebook purchased FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, mostly unknown to outside world than technology experts. This is how the above article from WashPost describes it:

It's a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.

And, here is the process through which we will build socialism earthly heaven:

The social-media landscape has become disparate enough - so many start-ups controlling so many different pieces of our lives - that we need a central place that will organize all of our actions for us. That place is FriendFeed.

[...] Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

Right now the majority of your news feed is filled with updates that your friends have (for the most part) made within Facebook. Status updates, engagements, zombie bites -it all shows up in your news feed. But those are all internal to Facebook; everybody spends plenty of time outside Facebook, as well. And in order for you to track your friends' activities you either have to subscribe to all of their different feeds or hope that they tell you when they add content to one of their other profiles. That's a hassle.

What you need is an aggregator - a place to come that gives you a news feed not just of what's happening inside your walled garden, but also what's going on elsewhere, too. A Facebook/FriendFeed mash-up - FaceFeed, we (and many others) will call it - would be exactly that.