Last week my cousin and I drove by a couple of guys in their garage working on a bunch of kick ass mopeds. We turned around and struck up a conversation and it turns out mopeds have some kind of cult following, which is a cool kinda cult in my mind. We also got to talking somehow about zombie walks in Grand Rapids, Michigan(where my cousin lives) and how that was one of those kinda scary cults. I still don't really understand what they are, so maybe I'm a dick for calling these zombie's a scary cult, or maybe they'd like that? Today I ran across this blog post over at Read/Write Web, discussing feelings of Facebook becoming cult-like. And wouldn't you know, they feature this photo from a zombie walk from the 'Grand Rapids zombie walk' group on Facebook! Classic!

Seriously though, in this post about the 200 million user milestone on Facebooks blog, she "describes some of the data mining that the company is doing of those connections. It's going to be great for advertisers, she says, it should also be very good for the rest of us as well." Great for Advertisers! That's what Facebook amounts to, not all the rich social connections(although there are lots of things that point to the fact that they aren't rich connections at all) and life streaming goodness that is our lives.
Lifton says a cult-like group "offers considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology."
Although, I am not opposed to the term cult as we generally use it because I think it is used too loosely, watered down for everyday use. I think surfers are part of a global cult. I think Drupal has a kind of cult following. And yes, Facebook is definitely a cult. But is that a bad thing? The R/RW article makes some really cool points. Worth a read, especially the comments at the bottom. My favorite one being "no.", by some facebook user.