This post is overdue but I felt some cringing while following the news coming from Facebook’s F8 developer conference yesterday. This is not more of the same where I complain just to complain or show my age and how I’m just too old for social networking. This is the case where I look at the state of networking and analyze the big picture sort of like I did in this post. The new Timeline is revolutionary in I believe it shows us all what we’ve contributed and how much we’ve handed over of us and what our lives are. I have long rallied for digital memories and have used services like MemoLane and Backupify that visually give me a look into my social life across many devices but offer the ability to download these files. They store my tweets, photos and check-ins and then make that data portable for a small fee. Facebook allows a download but to a collection of HTML files. I have this file and update it monthly as my social circles grow. Timeline will show us what we’ve given Facebook. It may be emotional and it may be shocking but we’ll reminisce and then realize that all of this is on Facebook. There are lot of people out there that don’t analyze social media, the why and the how and simply upload to Facebook without thinking of the repercussions of those actions.
I live a lightweight Facebook life. I don’t upload photos or videos unless they’re something for someone else and I don’t like things like “Starburst, Ford or blog posts that I read” I just don’t see a point in liking things. If I like something and believe it’s worth sharing, I write about it and post that blog post to my social networks. For my purposes, social networks are a distribution network with a few thousand people. (1300 on Facebook, 4000 on Twitter, 950 on Foursquare, 600 on Gowalla, 750 on LinkedIN, etc.). I don’t really share on those networks aside from Twitter but that is serving a different purpose and I’m happy with the direction they are going. Despite my lightweight approach to Facebook, I have made some recent changes:
- I have removed every photo uploaded to Facebook aside from one single profile photo that I will change once a year or as-needed
- I have un-liked every page, sport, religion, school and interest. My account has on file zero likes of any kind
- I have removed over 200 authorized apps and have only kept 5 (Trillian (for Facebook IM) MemoLane, Backupify, Klout and Spotify)
- I have removed all auto-posting to my wall when I attend events, add friends, comment on another person’s status or any other action
- I have removed all custom lists, groups, friends and pages
- I have removed a few dozen people I don’t know that were in the “Limited Access” class on Facebook. I removed limited profile as a classification of friends
- I deleted every post from the past 6 months from external services (this took a few hours and I wish I could remove all going back 5 years)
- I made every post from the start of time “Friends Only” leading up to today. Facebook has a tool that allows you to do this
- I made every aspect of my account Friends Only except for accepting messages or friends requests
- I removed my mobile number and all but one email account
- I disabled all emails, text messages and push notifications from Facebook
“Jon is making out with Kim”“Kim is taking off her shirt”“Jon just achieved the 2nd base badge” – Like this post or comment to congratulate Jon
With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.
Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work.
So, Facebook’s integration with Kindle will allow posting of what you’re reading to Facebook automatically and this goes for every time you visit TechCrunch or start playing a song on Spotify or play Farmville and it will all go into Facebook’s new “Ticker” that you see on the top right hand corner of Facebook.com. The ticket is things you should know about but may not care about like “Tim has been playing Farmville for 4 hours”. You can still like that and comment on it but it’s not a big news item. I don’t care who knows I’m reading TechCrunch but I don’t like Facebook knowing I’m reading TechCrunch.
I used to think Wikipedia and the vast amount of data we contribute to it would lead to the creation of artificial intelligence. Simply feed a robot the entire catalog of Wikipedia and you have a being that gets us and can ultimately destroy us. This was before Facebook knew who you were with (Places), what you ate (Foodspotting), how long you were there (Checking in someplace else) and that you bought condoms later (Amazon w/ social graph). Then you turned on a TV show (via Hulu with social graph) and drank a beer (photo of beer with date and tag). Most of this is still opt-in but with the new features, Facebook logged in on your browser will follow you around the web as web and app developers code it. As a developer, who wouldn’t want their app to show up on the ticker of every friend of one of your users. Jack using Foodspotting and that being on his ticker, news feed and wall is HUGE for you since he has 500 friends. For Jack, I don’t know how good that is when it comes to the long term photo.
Facebook owns the majority of all page views beating out Google. It’s clear that Facebook has won and they’re making millions on ads. These ads are targeted to you and, the more you add to the system, the more complex and targeted the ads will be. I am not a NIMBY to the situation but I hope that many realize what they’re doing. If you choose to still check-in to your girlfriend’s underpants on Facebook and share that with the world via apps like “BedPost” you’re welcome to it but don’t cry about not having privacy when you miss out on a job opportunity or see an ad targeted to you because of something you automatically opted into on Facebook.
My Timeline is going to be pretty bare and I wish I could see my life in the beautifully designed tiles but I won’t and that’s okay. I like my privacy.