The recent wave of news about Facebook has really touched a nerve with me. There was that email fiasco just last month, and more recently the news of open graph. I’m not the only one to see the potential for pure and unmitigated evil, and there is no indication that it will get any better. The future of online social media is grim. What really irks me is that it doesn’t have to be. As a long standing member I remember the requirement for a .edu or alumni email address just to participate in facebook. Things were much different then. Sure there were some apps and basic games, but over all it was a fairly sparsely populated service, and I liked it that way. Sure there wasn’t the access to as many of my friends as now, but there was something pristine and cultured about the site. Facebook was indie and cool. Then in a very short amount of time it turned into Myspace. Yes, I had a Myspace account, but I never could get past the juvenile idiocy that ran rampant through that community. I hated that every other page was fully of animated gifs and sparkletastic backgrounds. It was like having a group of tween girls kirked out on a sugar high assaulting every sense with glitter and cheap accessories from Spencers. Sadly this is the drain I see Facebook precipitously circling with one exception.Throughout the sordid span of my experience with Myspace, I don’t once recall the service ever notifying me that all the content of my account essentially and unequivocally belonged to Myspace. I know there were security concerns. There will always be security issues with anything popular on the web. The more a site or community aggregates visitors, the more rife with malcontent abuse it will become. Yes, China is busy crashing Google and farming our MMORPG gold, but there are plenty of petty little cretins, both foreign and domestic, just waiting for the opportunity to prove something. You expect to be worried about those kind of vulnerabilities. What you don’t expect is for a company to sell all your personal information to the highest bidder and then essentially gloat about it.
Then Zuckerberg shot his own foot when Facebook decided to start its own monetizing scheme with their own version of tokens. This didn’t sit too well with Zynga considering Farmville is one of the largest grossing games on the market, and they already had their own system set up. Granted they have smoothed things over, and the two are chummy once again, but it is exactly this kind of corporate arrogance that is rapidly becoming synonymous with the Facebook. Media outlets have been rather ruthless with their treatment of Zuckerberg and rightly so. I’m more convinced his recent recant was more damage control than any sincere apology for the travesty surrounding Facebook privacy.
Today we’re supposed to learn about the new “simpler” controls the company will launch in an effort to bilge the muddy waters that have started to submerge their happy ship. I don’t think that any amount of coercing will convince me to open my life back up to Facebook. I have already started taking steps to create a new bare account that will allow me to check up on friends without doling out heaping portions of my life to the provider. I’m also following closely a new alternative on the horizon called Diaspora which has me giddily anticipating the “good ole days” of Facebook. It will be interesting to see how everything shapes up in the coming months.
