03 Aug 2008
Facebook is for losers
I rarely go into Facebook these days, preferring to keep my profile updated via Twitter. But for some reason, last week I decided to go in an waste a few minutes. While there I also decided to update a few things in my profile with the aim to make it a little less personal. I’ll get to some of the reasons why in a minute. At any rate, I went into the “edit profile” and changed a few settings. Namely the ones that let you hide things.
I also selected not to show my relationship info, because it is really no one’s damn business.
What I expected to happen, ie, my personal information simply be hidden from my profile is not what happened. Instead, this note:
“Sara E Wood and John B Pike ended their relationship”
was sent to my 276 friends and John’s 354. How is that something you would expect to happen when choosing to “hide” information from people?
(Within 5 minutes both John and I had both received countless condolences. Even phone calls and people in my office coming to see if I was all right. Thank you all for you concern in my non-crisis moment! )
Another reason Facebook is for losers, I have had to unfriend people - who I actually maybe knew for like 5 minutes sometime in High School possibly because I was being sent Facebook CREEPY cruft such as:
And even being invited to groups like:
DESPITE not yet having blocked my personal info like my political affiliation (Vote Obama!).
LinkedIn, Flickr, etc know to give the content provider decent controls over their own private content. Seriously, how hard can this be to grok? That content is about me, provided by me upon which Facebook exists and claims to have some value in the world. At the very least allow me to control my own bytes!
