Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Before the Facebook platform was introduced, I knew plenty of people (in fact, I’m probably one of them) who had accounts, but rarely logged on — most people weren’t sufficiently compelled by the minute changes in their friends’ music taste to check it daily.

But once the platform was introduced, all my friends suddenly started finding reasons they NEEDED to check Facebook constantly (for most of these people, those reasons were Scrabulous). This is why the platform is such a brilliant business model. No matter what your obsession, Facebook can now target it. Not into “poking”? Fine, here’s some zombies. Not into zombies? How about political propaganda?

I never got into Scrabulous, but just as Long Tail advocates would predict, I’ve found an app that targets my obsessive streak. So far I’ve mostly percieved the platform as an opportunity to crankily delete dozens of invitations from people I’ve forgotten I ever knew to install apps I would never care about. But the allure of seeing my friends neatly categorized by type and temperament compels me to switch to the other side.

So if we’re Facebook friends, you should expect an invitation to add the “personality type” application. And you NEED to accept it.

Recently, Jesse and I took a road trip through the South (or rather, Appalachia and parts of the upper south); we visited my parents (and their dog and chickens) in West Virginia, drove through Virginia, visited Knoxville and Nashville in Tennessee, crossed Kentucky, drove back up to my parents’ house through Western West Virginia’s mountainous highways, and visited more family in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

I’ve been procrastinating on blogging about this because I’m not sure what to say. I could list the places we visited and things we did there, or I could try to describe the people we met, but none of that would really convey how I feel about it. It will have to suffice, then, to say that this was a strong contender for my favorite of all the vacations/trips I’ve ever taken.