RSS
Twitter
Facebook
Okay, I really do love Facebook as much as any of you- it’s my social media crack of choice, and I engage in any number of Facebook-related activities throughout the day despite my advanced age of mumblety-two, my ostensible tech savvy and the glaring fact I should really get up off my ass and take a walk or something.
However, one brief respite in my day is the car- when I get into my vehicle, it’s one of the few times I’m not actually tempted to log on and fight with someone about breastfeeding or post a rage comic. Maybe you feel the same way- and it’s not so much your garden variety lament about Facebook invading our whole lives like the brain slugs on Futurama, or even a safety concern (although both are quite valid critiques) but rather a basic puzzlement over how exactly Facebook fits in to the driving experience as a whole.
Maybe I am getting old. But I feel like the following statement from Facebook’s Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing (which really sounds like a title made up on the spot in a bar) Dan Rose about the Mercedes version of Facebook does the worst possible job at selling us on why we need Facebook in our cars as well as on our phones, iPads, laptops, TV set top boxes and on the kiosk at CVS- Rose explains:
“Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that. One of the core things that people do on their screens in the car is GPS navigation and the ability to see which of your friends are nearby is something we think will be really interesting for people.”
I mean, I guess. It’s nice to find people, but don’t we have texting, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and eyes in our heads for that? Does anyone else fail to see how it will even be possible to Facebook from our cars?
It doesn’t really matter. However the hell this thing works, it’s likely we will all reject the idea, complain for approximately 18 hours when it is launched about how the old version was better, and promptly and fully integrate it into our lives so completely that before you realize it, half of the status updates you read will be appended with the words “3 minutes ago from Hyundai.”
