Despite my disappointment, I was keenly aware that, from a blogging perspective, not getting in was still a pretty solid outcome. First off, hundreds of people manage to attend each and every Daily Show taping, and millions see the resulting episode on TV, but how many poor schlubs get rejected after having reserved tickets, like 20 max. In short, this, right here, is the kind of first hand account of Daily Show rejection that only a handful of blogger’s are in a position to give. Plus, I now have a solid understanding of the logistics involved in going to see a Daily Show taping, and in the end, dear reader, isn’t that the reason you come to this blog?

LOGISTICS!

• You can request up to four (4) Daily Show tickets here. They’re booked many months in advance, but if you check back every few days, you’ll likely stumble on a cancellation. This works for The Colbert Report too.
• When sign up for tickets, the email asking for confirmation tells you to show up at 733 11th Ave (between 51st and 52nd) from 3:30 to 4:00. It also says that your guests can show up as late as 4:30. This isn’t particularly accurate.
• Since they don’t actually give you tickets until they start letting you in, anyone can hold a spot for anyone else until about 4:30. I arrived at 3:50, but as I’ve already lamented, this was a wee bit too late. Had I gotten there at 3:45, I’m sure I would have gotten in.
• If it’s warm day, I’d probably show up a little before 3:30. If you’re on early side, you’ll wait on 11th, but the later folks wait around the corner on 52nd. It’s always less fun to wait for stuff around a corner.
• At 4:00 or so, someone explains that you absolutely cannot use a camera during the taping, and that you’ll have to go through a metal detector. As such, I would try to bring as little as possible to the event. (They also let you know that you’ll be able to use the bathroom once you get inside.)
• TV studios are kept cold, so stay sharp and dress appropriately! Also 11th Ave and 52nd street, which is right by the river, would be a very cold place to wait in line when it’s chilly out.

So there you have it. Jessica and I also have some tickets reserved for the Colbert Report, but they are for midwinter, so I’m less excited about all the standing around outside.

In other news, I’ve supplemented my inability to actually go out and do things by joining facebook and twitter. More on that later, but for now, here’s a vaguely relevant blog post I wrote a long time ago.

Thanks to the article (and this photo), I can safely proclaim Kevin, creator of the facebook application Enemybook, my most hateful friend (see how menacing he looks). Kevin’s facebook app allows users to list their enemies right in their facebook profile. It also inform these no-goodnicks precisely why they made the list, and allows you to periodically flip them off. Once the article appeared, Kevin was also interviewed on NPR, plus news of the whole thing appeared on slashdot and wired.com.

The amazing thing about all this press coverage is that Enemybook isn’t popular! Apparently the writer from the Globe saw the app mentioned on Ben Smith’s politico.com blog and decided she wanted to find out more. At that time, Enemybook only had about 1,200 users, but popular facebook applications have hundreds of thousands of users. Thanks to all the press Kevin now has over 5,000 users, but he still has a way to go before his app can make real money off of ads.

If you’re a facebook user, please do us all a favor, install the Enemybook and start picking fights with your friends. I’m sure Kevin’s hero Sun Tzu wouldn’t have it any other way.

With all that out of the way, I decided to turn my attention to Newsweek’s cover story, Facebook. I dare say that Newsweek seems a little late to the table with regard to the Facebook craze (for example, there was this lengthy New Yorker article over a year ago). Still, as Newsweek points out, Facebook is growing at 3 percent a week, so they’ll no doubt be a lot more Facebook news in our future.

Media attention aside, Facebook came a long way this last year. For one, it opened itself up to non-students (and apparently much of its current growth comes from people over 25). It also added newsfeeds, allowing users to quickly (and constantly) check up on each other. Most recently, it has provided a platform for web developers to write their own apps for use on Facebook. As the web becomes filled with people using Facebook-dependent applications, Facebook’s future becomes that much more secure.

Any social networking website relies on users designating their relationship with other users. In Facebook, friend relationships form the links in a social network. The network is used to spread information as well as navigate the website. When discussing the utility of Facebook, I think people tend to focus on its ability to share information among friends. As the internet grows however, there’s bound to be lots of new and easy ways for people to share content with each (for example, consider last week’s post on internet-based computing)

The real staying power of Facebook lies in the value of having online social networks at all. These networks allow us to take our real life identity and put it online, and once we all have online identities, we can do a lot more than just keep tabs on each other.

Suppose I have a website where I want to allow people to vote (for example Wikipedia could allow people to vote on whether certain articles are accurate). Voting only works if one person cannot pose as thousands of people, and vote thousands of times (in computer science land, this is called a sybil attack). Given that one person can fairly easily get their hands on many computers around the globe, posing as multiple people has traditionally been easy. Social networks offer a solution.

Though it’s certainly possible to start multiple Facebook accounts, it’s quite hard to create tens or hundreds of accounts. If you create all these accounts, they’ll need different friends, different profiles, different photos, etc. To fake all these things, you’d need to start making all of your phony accounts friends with each other, but this discrepancy would be reflected in the structure of the social network. As a result, an active user on Facebook (or perhaps some future, more refined version of Facebook) can be considered nearly as legitimate as you meet face to face in the real world. As a result identities on Facebook (or other social networking websites) are destined to become a building block of many future online applications.

I’m sure the folks at Facebook know all this and are busy adding buckets new features. In terms of future growth, it seems like they should focus on features that make for the most useful social network. That’s why, I’m surprised they haven’t added other types of relationships between users. If your boss, roommate, and grandmother are all on Facebook, it would be useful if you weren’t simply “friends” with all of them.

Also, Facebook should probably allow certain types of relationships to fade over time. If everyone you’ve ever met is your friend on Facebook, knowing that two people are friends becomes a lot less valuable. At the very least you should be able to “reaffirm” a friendship (although I suppose there’s poking and messaging people for that). Similarly some kind of “trusted” friend relationship would be useful for a lot of yet to be developed Facebook applications.

All I’m saying is that if Facebook adds these things, I’ll definitely consider signing up.