I intend to leave the Facebook soon. In the New York Times Technology section today there is an article by Maria Aspan on the Facebook’s “stickiness.” It seems that if you just deactivate your account, you leave all your content, every message exchanged, all your friends, groups, etc. in place in case you decide to reactivate. That’s convenient but spooky. “Welcome to the Hotel California.” If you want to delete your account to avoid being pwned, you have to delete every item — manually. That sucks so bad.
Steve Mansour had a humorous and pointed couple of posts about all this last summer. He remarked:
I’m reminded of being at the SaveTheInternet.Com party in Memphis where everyone was giving each other handjobs over how they spread the message about Net Neutrality and beat the telecoms with the help of Google and Yahoo. They didn’t realize that they helped win the battle, but in doing so, they lost the war. They turned a blind eye to their supposed allies and failed to apply the same yardstick to measure privacy neutrality as they did to network neutrality. Google is ranked as one of the worst privacy firms on the net.
I don’t know about you, but I like the idea of being in charge of my own private data, and controlling access to it accordingly. There will be lots of interesting battles fought over this in the next few years, so whatever you do, make sure you think long and hard about just how open you want to be with you own privacy – and whether others will treat it with the same respect as you do.
His bottom line:
…I really just don’t like companies that pretend to be communities.
Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?
On some levels, I really don’t care what the answer is to that question. I find the Facebook boring and stupid. None of the internal applications work the way I would design them and the possibilities for improvement are low.  Like Mansour, I simply want to be in charge of my own data. There are billions of us out here on the web and some tens of millions of users of the Facebook. Sadly, most of the people in the Facebook have expectations bounded by the Facebook’s limited features and functions. What might they achieve if we can break them out of the Facebook prison?
My conclusion and feeling prexactly, Doctor. At first there was the titillating innocuous fun of Twitter, then Facebook, then a flood of others. If one is paying attention, it does not take very long to realize how silly and sophomoric they all are. As best I can tell, none of them fulfill any need that I currently have or expect to acquire in the near future.
Perhaps it is time to clear out what’s left there in the way of personal data and abandon those drifting ships to more serious fools than me.
I think social network platforms will ultimately become all about purpose … you’ll use such a platform if you have a reason to be networking and in regular interaction with some other people who share the same purpose and with whom you want to be associated, otherwise not.
And the platforms that become useful in that way will hopefully be much smarer about giving people total control over their personal data and information.
Winston, I agree. The Facebook is indeed something silly and sophomoric, perhaps with something darker underneath. Jon, I agree with you too. Specific purpose, limited scope, interpersonal and community networking with personal control promises a brighter day.
Ning looks like a good path to follow for those who have a social networking purpose.
There was a big Facebook feature on a BBC whistleblower programme recently that confirmed all of this & more. Once Facebook gets inside your clothes it’s there for keeps – stickier than AOL. Sadly, interviewees continued to extol the virtues of F’book as a bona fide community even after the interviewer had blown his whistle at full lung power! Parasites who have located a need & are now dining royally.
Er…yes, I have Facebook, but my profile is down to the bone.
yeah, well i’ve replaced my scrabble habit with FreeRice. i don’t know if it’s legit and there’s not the interaction with other humans that scrabbulous afforded, but it’s fun.
although i do miss you, meskill and rangaswami kickin’ my ass in scrabble… that’s about the only thing FB was for me. that, and mike arrington flirting with one of my imaginary characters by FB email and furrier starting an argument and eventually threatening my elder male character…
watching the way the same people interacted so differently with my male character and my female character (who were far more popular than i ever was) was fascinating and instructive.
Ning is another sharecropper network too. Read the T&C’s. A little more ‘control’, but at the end of the day your ass is being shopped to anybody with checkbook.
Facebook’s data retention should come as no surprise.
It is a numbers game: “We Have Grown By 1000%!!!!”
AOL still has a bazillion screen names, despite the fact that it is such a dog they are trying to unload it on anybody who still has 3 modems. by not having to subtract, the weather is always sunny in Socialnetland.
Besides, do you really want 5000 ‘friends’ whose demonstrated internet skills have peaked at the mouse click?
There you have it, Alan. Too many users of the Facebook, like AOL customers, seem happy in the feedlot behind the barbed wire. Gathering these herds encourages a retrograde phenomenon, a “set-top box” mindset that is moving people back into the manageable markets of mass consumerism. Low grade interactivity with a TeeVee set might be all these people expect from netTech.
there’s a long, thick swath of crackbookers who are young (“young” = under 40, in obama parlance) and/or compulsively cool and/or hucksters of some breed or another. then there’s them, like me, with deflated expectations and a desire to play a little chess with a few old frienimies.
i don’t have ego enough to think ‘the great eye’ is looking out for me, specifically, and i do try hard each time i stroke the login nubbin to remember not to put my social insurance and credit card numbers in the profile (so far so good), but for the more
paranoidcareful and cautious i think there is something to the idea that these networks are in the end a huuge lab for marketing scientists.facebook/myjoint is the apogee of these private pits of passionate proles and promoters. the bolt is loaded tho. marketeers hurry up an tweak your cheese recipies.
“dood, why’m i ‘a-waitin’ moderation,” Follymacher sniffed.
is it cuz i said
obama?paranoid?nubbin?crack*?ahh… CREDIT CARD
I dunno… maybe a typo in your authentication mish-mash? I wondered too.
Is that it? Wow.