Not So Secret Society

Freemasons on Facebook: Forget about cloaks and secret signals and handshakes: Freemasons are on Facebook, and they want you to like them. As this Wall Street Journal article put it, “No self-respecting secret society can get by without a Facebook fan page anymore.” It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s kind of true. By the late 1950s Freemasonry membership was up to about 4 million in the U.S. Membership numbers, however, took a hit from the 60s’ anti-establishmentarianism, and by 2000 there were fewer than 2 million Freemasons. Freemasonry’s embrace of social media is part of an effort to open up the secret society a bit more to the public and to encourage others to join the Freemason community. WSJ

App of the Day: IKEA has a new app that designs a bedroom for you based on your Facebook page. It’s an interactive app that pops up on IKEA’s YouTube page. Once you provide access to your Facebook account, the app creates a 3-D tour of your personalized IKEA bedroom, complete with framed pictures of photos from your Facebook page. I tried it and was a little weirded out by the kind of whispering voiceover narration (something about wiggling toes?), and the picture of my friends dancing that was framed and put on a dresser — not exactly the picture I would choose to frame. It’s kind of creepy, kind of cool, pretty much like Facebook. It’s also fairly similar to Intel’s Museum of Me app or Facebook’s own Timeline. psfk