Free Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) by Craig A. Falconer Page B

respect and commanded him to consider the point. He looked around the table and tried to gauge the feelings of his men without asking for them. Minion’s face rarely reflected anything and Communications Colin utterly lacked the capacity to stand up for his opinions, so Amos concentrated his gaze on the hitherto silent Head of Marketing.
    “Gary, what do you say?”
    Red-tie Gary from Marketing, no friend of Kurt’s at the contest, was candid in his response. “I think the kid’s right about this one, sir. Compulsory location-sharing is the one thing that our research suggests people aren’t likely to stand for. Even having it activated by default will garner a lot of negative attention for our launch. It has to be opt-in.”
    “Fine,” Amos conceded, “we’ll ask them to opt-in. Everyone will, though. I’ll ask nicely.”
    “Good,” said Kurt. “What’s the idea with the new social network anyway? Why Forest?”
    Communications Colin answered again. He liked talking about his brainchild. “With Forest we’re aiming to connect everyone and to represent those connections visually. Each user will have their own publicly-visible tree. The tree will grow branches as the consumer connects with others and its branches will grow twigs to represent indirect relationships. Imagine I’m Forest friends with Terrance. If someone looked at my tree, they would see a branch containing his info which could be clicked through to his tree. At the end of that branch would be twigs representing all of his friends who weren’t also mine. Twigs will grow from twigs until the world is connected as one. Before long, any one consumer’s tree will contain a link to everyone else’s.”
    “So a tree is a profile?”
    “No, it’s a visual representation of your relationships. A good social graph, if you will. Profiles will be accessible as normal but the tree is a more immediate image. My branch to Terrance will grow thicker the more we communicate, and my tree will grow taller the more people talk about and communicate with me. Think of your tree as a vivid depiction of your social relevance — how much you mean to the rest of the world.”
    Kurt hated social graphs and the reductionist metrics behind them more than any other aspect of social networking. “So what happened, anyway?” he said. “Did you wake up one morning, look out of your window and think that what the world really needed was more social networks?”
    “No, less. We need less social networks. Ideally just this one. Consumers will have their wall, their friends, their status updates, their microblogging, their photos and their videos all in one place.”
    “And you really expect people to make new profiles and abandon the ones they’ve been using for nearly a decade?” Kurt knew that they wouldn’t, whatever Colin thought. “People have built their lives around this stuff. Walls, timelines, friends... none of you seem to understand; kids these days live on their profiles. They are their profiles.”
    “Don’t worry,” said Colin. “Forest profiles are automatically generated on seeding. As such, Kurt Jacobs is officially the first member of Forest. Congratulations. And as for existing social networks... they won’t be supported by The Seed, and Terrance’s scraping algorithm will collate consumers’ external data and import it into Forest. Once everything is in one place — our place — the rest takes care of itself. The transition will be seamless and it will change everything. Imagine looking into someone’s eyes and having your Seed look up everything on that person and present it to your Lenses instantaneously. You’re looking at this person and everything is written in the air beside them: age, interests, friends, dating history, popularity, political and religious views… everything. It’s far more detailed than the Lenses’ previous ‘ name / age / status / occupation’ display, and it all appears faster than you can blink.