Diving Deeper on Facebook

Have you ever been swimming with dolphins?

Unless you're lucky enough to already know some dolphins who like you, you begin by going out into the ocean on a boat. Someone climbs into the "tuna tower" on top of the boat. From the vantage point of the tower, you can see patterns in the waves on the surface of the ocean.

If an area water looks like it's boiling, it's probably a school of tuna feeding at the surface. It could make for some good fishing.

Sea turtles often swim well below the surface, where they aren't visible from a tower. But when they do come up for air, their round heads pop up for a few seconds, and then go back down under the water. You can see the small wake their heads create by slicing through the surface for a few seconds, and then the line of the wake goes away. Line, no line. Line, no line. If you see that pattern, you know there are sea turtles there.

Dolphins cut quickly through the water, or play. You can find them by looking for lines in the surface water (bigger than sea turtles' lines) or random splashing. If they jump out of the water, they're really easy to see because they break the line of the horizon. Then, you can spot where to go to find out if they're interested in swimming with some Homo sapiens.

Facebook is the tower. It's the place I can go to quickly see what's happening on the surface of my friends' lives. If I want to only interact with what's on the surface, I can choose to do that.

But I can also choose to go beneath the surface. Based on the surface patterns that I see on Facebook, I can choose where to dive deeper below the surface, and who I want to swim with that day.

Through the end of October, I'm twittering my trip to Maui: http://twitter.com/katieraver

See ya back here in November!