I get that I can connect with old friends and I like that. I can track the daily actions of people I haven't seen in years by watching the constant stream of attention metadata. It's kind of a social pornography. I can watch. I don't have to engage or put any meaningful social effort into the interactions. I think that is the addiction people have to Facebook. You know when your friend is furious with their kids. You can see that an ex boss/girlfriend/bff etc just experienced something rotten and feel the disgusting elation of another human being's misfortune. There's a constant stream of photographs of vacations, parties, pets. It's as if you've just gotten sucked into the Smith's slide show hell all over again but the benefit is that you can get up an pee anytime you need to.

My problem with Facebook isn't that I don't enjoy feeling like I'm a part of the biggest social gathering in Earth's history. Instead, my network has become diluted.

I'm connected with family, new friends, old friends, old work colleagues, business contacts, random stalkers etc. It's like everyone I've ever known is gather in one room and so every time I sneeze I'm worried that I might get boogers on someone since Facebook is tracking that.

The reality is that the real world consists of social bins. We seek out and interact with different individuals based on social context. It's not that we dislike someone (or maybe we do). It's not that we don't want to be friends or that we have secrets. Instead, we don't really want our business contacts being bother with the details of a local get together. We don't always want our neighbors to know about our business deals. I used to love that I could reap the benefit of constant contact with hundreds of people that I've interacted with over the past 20 years without putting much effort in. Now, my concern is that so many people from so many social bins are always listening that I fear appearing stupid so I say nothing. You can't defriend someone even though Burger King tried to make that simple. Not sure how I'd feel about that excuse. Dear friend, you are worth less than a really crappy hamburger.

I think this is the weakness of general purpose social networking tools. They lack social context and thus are exposed to the cycle I outlined above. No one is there so the network isn't valuable. Friends are there and the network has value. Everyone is there and the value of the network dissipates until the value is diluted perhaps to a point where it is worthless again.

Don't take this to mean I have withdrawn from the network, but don't be surprised I don't join anyone's mafia wars or send out the obligatory comment on a birthday. Instead, I'll be there. Watching. Silently....

Not all is roses. There is a dark side to this free hosting. Setting it up will make you want to cry. I am a developer, not a Solaris system administrator and so getting my application deployed was like having a vasectomy and being totally conscious the entire time. In hopes of saving time in the future for myself and others here is how to configure your Facebook Rails application for deployment via Capistrano on a Joyent Accelerator. The ideas aren't mine. I stole everything from all over the place. I added links at the bottom where I found some of the information. The rest of it I will just feel guilty about.

1. Setup your shell for capistrano. Follow the link for the how and why.
   Note my $HOME/.ssh/environment file contains this:
   
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/ucb:
/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/opt/csw/bin:/opt/csw/sbin:
/opt/csw/gnu:/opt/csw/gcc3/bin:/opt/csw/mysql5/bin:
/opt/csw/postgresql/bin:/opt/csw/apache2/bin:
/opt/csw/apache2/sbin

   Also be careful so that you don't edit ssh_config instead of sshd_config not that anyone would ever be so stupid and do that.
2. Make sure you have the Capistrano gem installed on your local machine:
   sudo gem install capistrano
3. capify your application:
   In the root of your rails application run this:
   capify .
4. You will now have a deploy.rb in your config directory. Replace it with this deploy.rb.
   Then be sure to replace the XXXXXXXX with the username provided to you in your welcome email from Joyent. Then look for the sections of deploy.rb that contain capital letters and enter in the relevant values. These will include your application name, your domain name, and the path to your repository.
5. Now create a directory inside your config directory and name accelerator. Then add the following three files into it:
   accelerator_tasks.rb - contains Capistrano recipes specific to the Joyent Accelerator.
   apache_vhost.erb - configures apache to point to your rails application
   smf_template.erb - starts up mongrel automatically for you when you system starts
6. Now we need a mongrel_cluster.yml file. Create a file called mongrel_cluster.yml inside of your config directory and put this in it:
   port: "8000"
   environment: production
   address: 127.0.0.1
   pid_file: /home/XXXXXXX/web/APP-NAME/shared/pids/mongrel.pid
   log_file: /home/XXXXXXX/web/APP-NAME/shared/log/mongrel.log
   servers: 3
   docroot: /home/XXXXXXX/web/APP-NAME/current/public
   cwd: /home/XXXXXXX/web/APP-NAME/current

   You will need to edit the paths to match the paths you setup in deploy.rb. This likely means that you will need to replace XXXXXXX with your joyent username and APP-NAME with the name of your application.

7. Subversion needs to know how to talk to your repository if it is password protected. ssh into the server and do this inside your home directory:
   svn co PATH TO YOUR PROJECT
   You can delete the directory when it is done. You do this so that your svn username and password are cached on the server which means that Capistrano will be able to checkout files.
8. While you are logged into the server be sure to create an empty database. The name should match the name in your database.yml file.
9. Be sure to enter the proper username for root into your database.yml file.
10. Now for the exciting part:
    Run cap deploy:setup inside of the root of your Rails project. It should run successfully. If not I am very sorry.
11. Then do this:
    cap deploy:cold

You should be up and running at that point.

More helps and information:
Joyent's quickstart. Although I would bypass that and look at the main how to found here. How to use Capistrano on a new Joyent Accelerator.

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial

You can bet that I will be living there as well during the next month.

I was a bit freaked out by that fact given that I was still working out bugs. I guess it is a good thing that I fixed a lot of major problems while I had the chance. Facebook is very cool. If you put up a new site you will wait for months usually to get indexed by the search engines and even then you are lucky if anyone visits you. On Facebook the traffic is built in.

Time will tell if the application will drive traffic to our main site or serve to generate any revenue. For now it is fun to watch people use the application and play around with house plans.