Facebook. A bit dull

While I’m all for Web2.0 and social media, my foray into Facebook has proven a little boring. It was only three or four days before I was no longer interesting in constantly updating my profile, my status, my friends list, my movies, my TV habits (none), my music, my opinions, my photos, my blahdy-frickin-blah.

If you’re not familiar with it, Facebook is a web application that allows you to publish a profile of yourself and share it with friends. It’s hugely popular with ‘the youth’ and is essentially the same type of application as the MySpace you might have heard about.

While I can see why people find it great, staying in near-constant touch with your friends for example, they way everyone does with SMS, personally I’m not sold on the idea.

What the social networking revolution offers is these great and fantastic ways of communicating to each other. It also offers us the chance to connect more closely to people over great distances. But in Facebooks case? It offers the chance to data mine like a mthrfkcer.

Facebook itself seems to offer a small guarantee that it’s not using your personal information for business purposes, according to Wikipedia that is, but apparently this is not the case for the third-party applications everyone enjoys using. Got the “Favourite Movies” app? Someone is tracking that. Got the “Places Visited” app? Someone knows about the typical travel habits of someone in your demographic.

It’s entirely possible that this is a flight of fancy, and there’s no need to up my dose of anti-paranoia drugs. On the other hand, it’s entirely reasonable to think they’d be data mining. And why the hell not? And what’s actually wrong with that? Well, nothing. It just kind of pisses me off.

I think what my gripe really runs to is that the site doesn’t seem to offer much more than a sense of connectivity I’m not really needing right now, and a faint whiff of things to come in the continual commercialisation of teh interweb. All yr datas r belong 2 us.

Oh… and be warned. You can’t delete your account. Once that thing is up you can only suspend your membership. If you want to delete the content you’ll have to make several hundred clicks to remove everything off the site. Unless you go through all that drama, everyone in the world will be able to access everything they need to know about you, for eternity.

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inastrangeland Says:

31 July, 2007 at 7:40 pm

Okay then. I won’t Facebook. Not that I wanted to anyway.

Years ago, when we first got married, my husband was working for Telecom. One day he mentioned the possibility that in the future, everyone would have their own personal telephone number, and they would carry their telephones around with them. I thought that sounded appalling. I really didn’t want everyone to be able to contact me, anytime, anywhere.

As for everyone knowing about me, anytime, anywhere – that sounds even worse.

We do have cellphones, but he virtually never uses his, and I keep my number very quiet. if the phone goes, I assume it’s because something has happened to one of my children. Not that cellphones aren’t useful! But 24/7 connectivity is too much.

beth r Says:

1 August, 2007 at 1:57 am

and just last night, barbara “forced” me to join. consider yourself added.

llew Says:

1 August, 2007 at 8:15 am

You’re just pissed I didn’t gift you an aquarium.

Oh wait… you’re just pissed I DID gift you an aquarium.

Chris Says:

1 August, 2007 at 11:02 am

The data mining thing seems to be a real emerging concern. Facebook is pretty obvious (drunken photos + sexual proclivities + geographic location + employment = Oh Dear), but most bloggers leave just as wide a trail for anyone who wanted to look. I sign blogs with my blogger identity, which is just a hop and a skip from my offline and work identities. Although I try not to say anything online that I wouldn’t say in a crowded room, the fact that Google probably knows more about my web activity patterns than I do is a bit of a worry.

Che Tibby Says:

1 August, 2007 at 1:28 pm

dude. it wasn’t the aquarium.

it was the aquarium. the vampires. the werewolves. the friends list. the world map. the endless group invites. the zombies. the other vampires. the music/movie catalogue. the frickin do i need to go on…

beguile Says:

1 August, 2007 at 2:34 pm

Yes the data mining does worry me.
I also removed the vamire app, and the werewolves, and the aquarium. I did, however, add the scrabble app and enjoy the possiblities of the lastfm app.
I suspect that I will get to the point were the data mining possibilities will piss me off sufficiently to delete everything but the bare minimal stuff but until then I will be online playing scrabble…

Span Says:

9 August, 2007 at 12:34 pm

What I’m enjoying about it is finding a lot of people I had lost touch with. I’m avoiding a lot of the apps, although I added a few to flesh out my profile page a little. I also like that I can upload photos and share them, as there are a lot of people I never got a chance to show my shots from travelling or various events, and this way if they want to look they can without me boringly shoving the album in their face.
I didn’t join any of the previous similar sites though, so maybe it’s all extra shiny for me?
But certainly it feels like this big rush of discovery in the first day or so, as you find people and write on walls and so on, and then it just becomes an everyday distraction, like most other things, mostly filled with waiting rather than doing.