The average Facebook user sees only 20 percent of the 1,500 stories per day that could have shown up in their news feed.  The posts you receive are determined by algorithms whose bottom line is Facebook’s bottom line.  The company is constantly adjusting all kinds of dials, quietly looking for the optimal mix to make us spend more of our time and money on Facebook.  Of course the more we’re on Facebook, the more information they have about us to fine-tune their formulas for picking ads to show us.  

Facebook’s new Timeline function gives its 800 million users the chance to show, share and step into each other’s lives — or, more realistically, their edited lives. Constantly re-published electronic memoirs, these re-formatted Facebook pages are like Regency Period courtesan Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs — a scroll down memory lane, typed up just the way the writer wants, leaving silences in spaces and intent behind words, tags and lyrics.