The biggest irony in my opinion is the existance of the "mute" feature on facebook. I am not a FB user, but apparently, the more you share, the higher the likelihood of somebody muting you.
So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.
Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.
MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook.
Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr.
Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.
So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.
It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored. Which is not a bad thing, noisewise, it natural and to be expected, but that's besides my point.
My point is that you will always have a default friend who wants to hear everything you share, a friend who will never mute you, never block your Zynga Blogville updates. No, it's not me, nor is it Tom Anderson; your default friend is Facebook itself. FB will always listen to you and will always want to know about everything you do.
For me, the best way to use Facebook is to "mute" everyone. Family, friends--everyone.
It has the following advantages:
- No one knows that I've muted them.
- I'm still on Facebook, so if people need to contact me through that medium, they can still do it.
- If I'm really curious about what anyone has been up to, I can still look at their page
- No need to log to procrastinate because I never have any updates.
I understand the article is sarcastic, but let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people. From a wide angle view, this is pretty significant.
Imagine if you had the capability of examining your great-great-grandfather's life at the daily level. How amazing would that be? To localize this, imagine yourself in your 80's being able to zoom to any day of your life at any point to relive and review how you thought, what you thought at that particular moment.
This is what I use Facebook for. Sure, I use it to connect with my friends, but I also use it so that when I'm knocking on death's door, I'll have something concrete to look back at that is more stable than my ailing memory will be. I'll also be able to hand it down to my spawn and their spawn.
I've always considered Facebook a new kind of public utility, just as revolutionary as the post office used to be.
In the old days people wrote diaries. That way they could choose whom to share their story with, they could burn them or they could hand them to their spawns.
the likelihood is far higher, however, that in just 20 years time all the history you've entered into facebook will be gone. Not sure facebook see themselves as a public service, and I'm very sure they're not inclined to spend huge amounts of money archiving terabytes of dead people's data indefinitely
Why do you think Facebook will still exist by the time you die? If you want to keep your data for an extended period of time, it would probably be better to do it yourself.
Reading this article was very very painful... and honestly, everyone here is hitting the nail on the head - they are just exposing how much info they are collecting about people. Facebook is the next Experian/TransUnion/Equifax. In the past (I worked in corp. security and investigations) you had to go to ChoicePoint and have law enforcement-like credentials to get a good background profile and picture of someone else. As more and more of this info is aggregated by Facebook, investigators will go to them for a much richer profile that could have ever hoped for.
My gut is that this is just a trend right now. Eventually people will pull back once it gets old. And trust me, things get old. Remember chat? Everybody was crazy about it. There have been many trends that have gotten old too. Just like in fashion,music,video, trends change.
I think Facebook's new features are good. They made me realize how much of my old crap (status updates, comments, etc) Facebook has stored. So I deleted everything older than one month, using the new Activity Log view and some Selenium scripts.
I'm sure you didn't delete those. You only hid them from the timeline. There's a huge difference.
I have hid many the old stuff too, but sometimes, especially with timeline transition, few old items kept popping up and wouldn't hide until fifth or so times clicking the hide button.
I'm sorry, but I feel I need to ask: am I alone in not using Facebook since graduating college? Every time I see an article, every time I watch the news, I get the impression that Facebook has somehow weaved itself into our daily lives, yet the only times I think of Facebook is when someone posts an article like this on HN (and yes I'm aware the article is sarcastic, but there are many more articles which are serious)
Remember that Facebook started out being available only at US colleges, and the users that got in then will have different usage patterns than those of us that got in later when it was generally available. My friends on Facebook are real friends, family, coworkers, and classmates from high school and university, so it's not just a subset of people I want to stay in touch with, it's pretty much all of them.
Funny. I just disabled my account this week and don't have plans to go back. Facebook never made much of an impact on my life and I've finally decided the loss of privacy is no longer worth staying on.
Edit: Now after having read the post I realize it is sarcastic. So maybe I'm not so different after all.
I found out my blatantly fake account was disabled this week, after more than a year of using it. Oh well, (almost) nothing of value was lost. Wondering if I can make a new one (also fake, of course) with the same email.. probably not I'd guess.
...more so for the people who collect user's personal data. Funny, I haven't had that many telemarkerters since FB. Yes, we are all that much more connected (whatever that means; I don't use FB at all so I wouldn't know), but there must be a better way than to dump our personal lives into servers 'out there'. I hope 'profoundly changed' means that it has taught some of us to think twice before we give out our personal data. Startups around FB have benefited from its existence, so I should balance my comments with some positives. A debatable issue that will surely continue...
If this keeps happening, you'll start asking someone about their early life and they'll just suggest you add them on Facebook and read about it yourself.
I had a similar experience talking to a friend who had just started blogging. We hit a discussion point he had apparently already covered and if I just read it instead of talking...
Facebook should just be there to remind you of people's birthdays, but it doesn't really do that very well either.
is this guy tripping or what? facebook extended a few features (eg. not just liking, but reading and eating and whatever) and introduced timeline, which is gonna be quite creepy for all those very active facebookers out there. seriously, what's the big deal?
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.
[+] [-] majika|14 years ago|reply
MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook.
Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr.
Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored. Which is not a bad thing, noisewise, it natural and to be expected, but that's besides my point.
My point is that you will always have a default friend who wants to hear everything you share, a friend who will never mute you, never block your Zynga Blogville updates. No, it's not me, nor is it Tom Anderson; your default friend is Facebook itself. FB will always listen to you and will always want to know about everything you do.
[+] [-] busyant|14 years ago|reply
It has the following advantages: - No one knows that I've muted them. - I'm still on Facebook, so if people need to contact me through that medium, they can still do it. - If I'm really curious about what anyone has been up to, I can still look at their page - No need to log to procrastinate because I never have any updates.
Kind of perfect, for me at least.
[+] [-] hugh3|14 years ago|reply
But the remaining folks are largely my real friends, so it all works out.
[+] [-] jawngee|14 years ago|reply
Imagine if you had the capability of examining your great-great-grandfather's life at the daily level. How amazing would that be? To localize this, imagine yourself in your 80's being able to zoom to any day of your life at any point to relive and review how you thought, what you thought at that particular moment.
This is what I use Facebook for. Sure, I use it to connect with my friends, but I also use it so that when I'm knocking on death's door, I'll have something concrete to look back at that is more stable than my ailing memory will be. I'll also be able to hand it down to my spawn and their spawn.
I've always considered Facebook a new kind of public utility, just as revolutionary as the post office used to be.
[+] [-] aw3c2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubicle67|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
And selling the data to advertisers.
[+] [-] fadsdie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaving|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sologoub|14 years ago|reply
Onion really has a great parody of this: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
[+] [-] felipemnoa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommi|14 years ago|reply
I have hid many the old stuff too, but sometimes, especially with timeline transition, few old items kept popping up and wouldn't hide until fifth or so times clicking the hide button.
[+] [-] vimalg2|14 years ago|reply
Its not like i trust Facebook to honour the deletes, but one must try one's best.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] veyron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henrikschroder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] calebmpeterson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Astrohacker|14 years ago|reply
Edit: Now after having read the post I realize it is sarcastic. So maybe I'm not so different after all.
[+] [-] reinhardt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suivix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandroyong|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technoslut|14 years ago|reply
What I also I hope is that algorithms get better so it can know how a photo, video or post should be shared so the user won't have to think about it.
[+] [-] scrame|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pumainmotion|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majika|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flarg|14 years ago|reply
No thanks.
[+] [-] njharman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napierzaza|14 years ago|reply
I had a similar experience talking to a friend who had just started blogging. We hit a discussion point he had apparently already covered and if I just read it instead of talking...
Facebook should just be there to remind you of people's birthdays, but it doesn't really do that very well either.
[+] [-] pumainmotion|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jcfrei|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] translocation|14 years ago|reply
The point being that Timeline is not, in fact, a world-changing feature.
[+] [-] ltamake|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itswindy|14 years ago|reply
Ummmm...not mine. I use it sometimes but total posts under a dozen. Google knows way more than FB about me but that's changing little by little.