Things change

May 29, 2008

I said I would never do it.  I promised that I wouldn’t be part of the “hype”.  I went for ages not signing up, but I’ve finally bitten the bullet and joined Facebook.

Ok first up, the reason for joining.  Tara’s been on the site for some time, and is able to keep in touch with a lot of our friends and family both in the UK and around the world.  It’s not “right”, but Tara very much acts as my “social secretary”, telling me what people are up to, being the main point of contact for people to contact us and vice-versa, generally making sure I do thing other than just work!  I’m certainly “busy”, but wont lie saying that I’m busy to keep in touch with friends - those are too important for me to “forget” or lose contact with, although I’m very fortunate to have friends though that when we do get back together it’s like it was just the other week I’ve seen them.  However, it seems that I frequently have “good intentions” to send an update/hello/catch-up email, but either find I have little to say, or feel I should write a big-old email (there’s a sweet-spot in there somewhere, which I always seem to miss :)).  Watching Tara successfully find our friends and have short exchanges, has in some ways, convinced me that this might be worth trying.

Now reasons for putting if off for so long.

I hate social networking sites in general, but have a big disdain for things like Facebook and MySpace in particular.  MySpace is just ugly IMO, and although Facebook is better, I’ve always had the impression that they are full of teenagers and college kids (nothing wrong with that, I was one once!) that would just bug the hell out of me with superpokes, zombies, etc.  Mostly though I have two issues with these sites - advertising and privacy.

I totally understand that advertising is a business model for a lot of things on the web; I appreciate that there’s a number of things that I don’t have to pay for because there’s an ad somewhere on the page (although for things I use a lot, I have no-trouble paying).  However, in the search for increased revenue, it seems that pushing ads to people have got out of hand.  Viewer-aware adds (or personal targeting, whatever you want to call it) I can’t stand.  The fact that there are ever more companies gathering info on me, what pages I go to, what searches I make, things I buy, etc, etc, makes me uncomfortable.  “If you’ve got nothing to hide…” may be a good argument, but even so, I don’t want some “profile” of me being out there, even if it for pushing ads that I might want to see.  Who knows what tenuous connections can be made from my online habits.

Which I don’t BTW.  Want ads that is.  I rarely, if ever, click on them.  I don’t make impulse buys, and if there is something I want, I’ll do the research on it to find out which one to get.  Christ, I DVR pretty much everything I watch, fast-forward through the tv ads, and change channels with liberal use of the “jump” button on the remote on the rare occation I am watching anything “live”. So, the ad marketplace may work for some people, but not for me, and the more “aggressive” the adds are (popups, popunders, flash that “slides” over what I’m reading, etc, etc), the less likely that a) I’m going to click on them, and b) I’m ever going to go back to that site.

The more concerning issue for me though is privacy.  Facebook’s Beacon freaked me the F-out (although it was nicely ingenious how it worked) with the potential for adding even more info to the “online profile” of me that clearly exists on some hard-drive.  Governments are becoming even more “1984″, and adding more information such as my social network just adds more of what I may want to keep to myself.  It’s not been targeted just yet, but I’m convinced that there’s big security concerns with having the amount of social data that is out there (and building) over and above web-worm issues.  I’m going to be looking forward to reading RSnake’s book that he was telling me about the other day (which I’m going to keep quiet about now because I don’t think he’s talked about the title or content widely yet, but sounded like it’s going to have a lot to do with this area).

Finally, I dislike how companies like Facebook are going for the whole “walled garden” thing - trying to get everything people want inside their app, keeping them in there as long as possible, and being very “closed” for sharing that information.  I though that we had learned this doesn’t work (at least not for very long) from the Compuserve/AOL days?  The web was supposed to free information up, not be yet another platform in which to lock people into something.  I’ll be using Facebook minimally, just for keeping in contact with friends, and will still be using this blog and my personal email, not to mention the web in general, for most other things.

So, I guess now that I’ve got that out the way I’ll be adding people I know and are friends with over the weekend!  I’m going to have the same QA gate as I do for my LinkedIn account, so please don’t “friend” me unless we’ve met in person on more than a few times, or have some “history” :)  Other than that, I’m looking forward to being in better communication with friends and people I’ve been neglecting.

ETA 6/1/08:  Knew I had seen an article about the “walled garden” and data these companies keep on you.  Not a whole lot to add in this article, but there’s some links to other interesting posts.

Posted in Misc