I got a writing assignment today that is of the end-of-year variety. I started thinking about the past year. What can I say about it? Where are we now, and where are we going? We’d all like to be able to look down the road a bit, wouldn’t we? Hoping the past will predict the future. As I was thinking, I pulled up Facebook and was randomly scanning profiles when I got the idea that I should go back to my own profile and look at my groups. I’ve been collecting them all year. What can they tell me? Let me explain.

I meet cool people, and people I know know cool people (stick with me), so each time one of my friends joins a group, I see it in my news feed. I take a look at the group; if I like it, I join. I tend to join more often than no, so here it is early December and I have about 137 groups I’ve joined. Seems like more than many of my friends individually. Scrolling through this list of groups and I see distributors, films, festivals, technology and new media, even ephemera, but it all adds up to a powerful year-end review.

But, like I said, we want to know the future. I evaluate the list, going over groups that seem to me like they are “over,” and pulling out others that I think might have interesting things to show me sometime soon. Some examples of sites I’ve pulled off my list: New TeeVee, Why Democracy?, We Are The Strange, TED and We Hate Unnecessary Packaging (actually an activism group of over 3000 without a website!).

I don’t want to predict what this list means, I just want to follow them more closely and see what they have to teach me. I guess I should add Facebook since it keeps morphing but has so far stayed pretty great.

Anyone care to share their year-end list of movements, companies, people to watch?