I had a true "a-ha" moment today, sitting in the hall listening to Mark Zuckerberg give his keynote address at F8, Facebook's annual developer's conference.
To coin a phrase, history isn't just written by the victors. It's written about the victors: the people we've all some how collectively deemed important and significant. But, in Facebook's perfect world, by introducing their new timeline feature, they want to write history about EVERYONE.
Every action and relationship and preference for every single human being on the planet.
So, a billion years from now, when our sun has gone supernova and even our graves have been reduced to cinders, if someone has the presence of mind to stick Facebook's user database on a truckload of drives and shoot it into space before the end, some alien civilization will know exactly when my niece graduated from high school, and what kind of music my coworker liked to listen to and when my classmates' babies were born and when I got engaged and how much we loved each other. And they'll know that about all of you, too.
It's a true history of the human race, were we all matter enough to be cataloged.
Too romantic? Probably. But its a nice dream, and worthy of aspirations.
