Here is the thing when considering sharing your stuff with your "friends" it's important to be able to distinguish between close ones and acquaintances. Once your mom joined facebook it became a very public forum. So you make changes or stick with it. I can see why the knee jerk reaction to the Open Graph but it seems to me facebook is making changes and listening while trying to grow their thing. Remember there was a time that your address and phone number were in a big thick book unless you paid not to be included or have your number listed. So what is the difference here? If you transmitted over a CB radio anybody could respond.
So what if you give a little more info? Don't you want custimized solutions for the things you like so they automatically display for you? A interesting example of the Open Graph change is if your boss is your friend on FB and you like a song on Pandora or article on CNN and they happen to be on the site with Open Graph enabled they will be able to see you like it or shared it if you choose to have the info made available. This is when knowing more about your settings is important. Again, it's important to know that if you read it and don't physically click the "LIKE" button then nobody will know.
Granted would be nice if you were allowed to editorialize why you liked something but alas that's what twitter and FB are for when you share with your friends in the first place. The NYT via scobleizer pointed out from public Q&A with a FB exec that the way Pandora is using the concept opens up even more discovery of music but I digress. What if you don't want your friends to know you like The Bare Naked Ladies(I don't btw)?
Well one option that is gathering momentum is to quit facebook all together on May 31st. but that would be just like quitting smoking or worse yet television no? What are you going to go to Amazon to a buy or download a book with all this new time on your hands and what do you ignore the reviews? How cool would it be if the people you trust helped you make a selection instead of a complete stranger.
So what if I still want to communicate with friends virtually but don't want to give marketers more access than I am comfortable with? Well there is diaspora.com for that issue which is open source project that is currently collecting funding to keep your private info in and advertisers out. We'll see how this goes. The world does run on advertising whether we like it or not it's a question are people willing to pay more?
But do watch what you say or a drunk Zuckerman may delete your FB account if he does not like what you say!
Frequently Asked Facebook Security Questions:
If you need help with your setting check out this graph on NYT
How is the Open Graph supposed to work with my favorite sites?
How do I delete my facebook account permanently?
Interesting Fact: The Facebook Privacy Policy is currently longer than the Constitution of the United States.
When is the official quit facebook day?
You decide.
2 comments:
I quit smoking and television (ok, I still download/netflix stuff, but I can stop whenever I want), so I guess I know which way I'm headed.
In seriousness, I've always had all my FB shit locked down as tight as they'll permit from day one, and I'm a fairly public/open person (probably why people shy away from me at parties, that or the wild-eyed ranting).
How can FB really grow anymore? They're basically attempting to restart the failed AOL model now that they have the entire world market share. They're a bigger borg than Google, but without the development potential. Some other idea will come along that will grab everyone's attention and FB will just become a big sweltering cesspool that people no longer talk about, kind of like myspace, friendster, etc.
I predict some kind of p2p social networking trend where you can easily connect with people but have much more personal control over the way their information is shared but have the same kind of app connectivity and ease that FB does. Or actually, broader application integration but the same sort of easy development protocols. In some ways it's really just a server space/access integration problem, but that's less and less of an issue every day.
(And if you want to work on this idea with me, say the word. We could be rich by Friday.)
Yes, read a book. Books can be found in numerous places other than Amazon, by the way.
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