Orcmid's Lair: I will Facebook no more Forever

Orcmid's Lair

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2007-12-26

I will Facebook no more Forever

Technorati Tags: orcmid, Facebook, social networks, social grid, Internet surveillance, privacy

I am continuing my comparative postings of videos handled in different ways. The change from when I last did this is the nearly-identical quality between kyte.tv and Soapbox on MSN. The webcam-captured and edited WMV file is the same for both uploads, and while I still give the quality edge to Soapbox, they seem very close to me. The uploaded WMV is of much higher quality than either while still being within the file-size limitations of both services. So we are also seeing the impact of the two compression and conversion techniques of MSN and kyte.tv.

I also noticed some rather intrusive use of inserted commercials and other programming when I visit my Soapbox on MSN, with my play list expanded automatically with garbage of no interest to me, not unlike leaving a TV on in the house all day (something I don't do either, and the similarity to daytime-television pabulum is particularly icky). In contrast, the blog embedding appears to be very clean and the information provided after viewing here is clean and pleasant enough.

I have a large stack of web log clippings that accumulated on the topic of Facebook and social networks in general. I may post some of these at some point, but Facebook is no longer at the center of my attention.

Video: I will Facebook no more Forever. I pulled the plug on Facebook a few weeks ago. I finally got around to letting Facebook folk know that I was gone on purpose by posting the enclosed video to the Scobleizer kyte.tv channel that is also seen on Facebook.

What tipped me over was with the succession of disclosures around Beacon. The decisive moment was Dare Obasanjo's damning take. That was enough for me to go "ick," declare that I had experienced enough moments-of-truth, and vamoose. I had enough from Facebook to know that it is not reconcilable with my personal values when it comes to the Internet as a social medium.

I was never hooked on Facebook. I checked in once or twice per week just in case there were notices for me to deal with. I stopped installing applications and my tendency was to delete two groups for every new one that I joined.

My principle interest in Facebook was learning more about social networks and to sharpen my own sense of what the social grid could provide if it were disintermediated in a way that could scale, much like the counterpart achievement with RSS feeds. I've seen enough of Facebook about that. I'm now looking for materials that look at how social grids can be user-constructed and -operated, with scaling by aggregation services rather than silos.

Dare Obasanjo: Facebook Beacon is Unfixable. Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Live (web log), 2007-12-01.: Obasanjo works on Microsoft's Windows Live properties, and his analysis reflects sensibilities sharpened in that work. What's fascinating is not only the in-your-face way Beacon was done, and the scrutiny it has attracted, but the fact that correlation of user behaviors has been possible ever since various social sites started dropping cookies left-and-right. Google is my biggest example, Yahoo! is probably another, as are some blogs.msdn.com, and it also happens with some well-known blogging software that recognizes all of their properties that I visit once I created an account on one of them. I'm not sure how this is going to play out, but I suspect the temptation will be too much to resist, as just demonstrated by Google's Reader gaff.
DavidNYC: Delete My Bleeping Account, Facebook! Daily Kos, 2007-12-25 (via JD Lasica via Scoble links).: Reports what Facebook says you must to to have your account fully deleted, as opposed to merely deactivated. I'd do that, but I'd have to re-activate to carry out those stupid instructions. Since the Facebook Nazis (oh look, I played the N-card) will delete accounts on their own based on some infraction or another, the whole deal seems to be bogus. Until I read this I forgot how difficult it was to close my CompuServe (as extinguished by AOL) account, and that if I actually knew the password any longer, I could just use old 70100,271 to log back in again. Somehow, after all of this time, I doubt it, but orcmid@cs.com is probably still lying dormant over there.
Robert Scoble: Google Reader Needs GPC. Scobleizer (web log), 2007-12-26.: Scoble argues for Granular Privacy Controls. He makes a good point, although there is always going to be the question about how granular is going to be granular enough and how easy it will be to understand and control that granularity. This seems to be an important consideration in all social-graph contexts, and it will be interesting to see how that can be handled with RSS (and especially Atom) streams too. It has to work server side, creating something we want to remove friction from. Maybe it is a great opportunity for more Pamelaware.

posted by orcmid at 12/26/2007 11:10:00 AM

Comments:

Yeah, I'm losing interest in Facebook too. It seems worth having a presence, just because so many people I work with do, but I'm not "getting" Facebook, I must admit. For example, I have yet to experience any desire at all to share an "application" (as they call them).

# posted by

Doug: 26 December, 2007 15:21