Facebook and the "Social Graph"

itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing: 'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect (the name) is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity. ... What does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.'"

Comments

Facebook

[kyrio]

is for chumps. I don't understand how people can give away ALL of their information like that.

Re:Facebook

[zero.kalvin]

Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

Want to know what's much more social and stores none of your information for random strangers forever? Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!

Re:Facebook

[AnonymousClown]

Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.

That's not real contact, though. It's a one way broadcast contact.

It's one thing to keep up with distant friends - it's a hell of a lot cheaper than phone calls, but in many cases it's a replacement for in person contact - even if folks are local. Sure, there are folks who use it to say "Hey, I'm at Joe's Tavern tonight, come and join me!" but others?

Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Re:Facebook

[zero.kalvin]

Since when our social interaction were rational ? There is no point in rationalising this for the human majority. If putting information about themselves on a site so they'd connect with people is what's required , they would do it. They see this as a way of being capable of interacting with more people using less time. Question, how many(of active) profiles have a friend list under 20 friends? I would suppose not a lot, I would even go as far as saying probably very rare. People want to meet more people(in general) and online social interaction can give you something of that in less time. So people put the information there, so people would see it.

Re:Facebook

[drachenstern]

I realize the OP was being a troll, but please mod the parent up. /.ers need this awareness. Facebook is not for /.ers, it is for our mom's and our SOs. The ones who don't understand why a cryptographically hard password is important.

Because we are social

Re:Facebook

[RagManX]

That's nice, but only works in a romanticized version of reality. Almost all of my friends live hundreds of miles away. I don't care for most of my cow-orkers, and have little time available to do much with my friends who live nearby because I have a schedule to maintain with my kids and my friends work different hours than I do. There's a ridiculous number of reasons why for many people it is difficult to actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends IRL, and probably just as many to justify keeping in touch via social media. For many, it's almost like we're integrating technology into our lives to give us more ways to keep in contact with people who physical world constraints make hard to spend face time with.

Re:Facebook

[Hijacked Public]

I have friends on a few different continents.

I don't Facebook though, because most of them don't either, but I do use Facebook as a verb.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I cant believe you went there

"Facebook is not for /.ers, it is for our mom's and our SOs"

you sad sack.

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

You want your mother and SO to give Facebook all of their personal info, along with some credit card numbers, because they don't understand why a good password is important?

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

I also have friends all over the world. I use instant messaging to make contact with them in a two way line of communication that doesn't save every letter we type to each other..

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!

I like to choose my friends based on common interests instead of geographical convenience.

Not that I especially like Facebook either (forums > facebook), but restricting myself to people I see everyday would make me a very lonely man.

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Wrong. Evolution has no "purpose". Fixed: Those who were more predisposed to communicate one to one survived better.
Eventually, those who can communicate better in Social Networks may have better lives and consequentially they may dictate the human race evolution pattern.

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

I'm betting that the majority of profiles have less than 30 "friends" attached to them. They would be made up of family and close friends. The reason for this being that they don't spend their lives on the computer and actually interact with people while being in the same room with them, without using a computer.

Hard to believe, I know.

Re:Facebook

[AnEducatedNegro]

We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Says the man posting on Slashdot

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a replacement. It's a supplement. I see what my friend posted on facebook, and I ask him about it next time I see him *in person*.

Re:Facebook

[Pojut]

is for chumps. I don't understand how people can give away ALL of their information like that.

That's why you only give the information you don't mind people knowing. Just because there is a box where you can put your full address doesn't mean you should actually enter your full address. Likewise, if there is something you don't want the public or your job or your family to know about, don't mention it on your Facebook.

This isn't rocket science...all it takes is a little discretion.

Re:Facebook

[mcgrew]

Who needs FaceBook when I have slashdot and Felbers?

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

I also like to choose friends based on common interests. Just so happens that there are 6 million people in my city, not too hard to find those people! The people I meet online are just that, people online. I don't pretend that we are BFFs.

Re:Facebook

[tophermeyer]

I think the point was that to date we have spent millions of years evolving to maximize our face to face social interactions. The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions.

If those social networks persist for an extended period of time than we may certainly evolve to maximize them. However, evolution happens by selection through successful reproduction. As this is most certainly a face to face activity, in person social skills will likely remain paramount.

Re:Facebook

[Redlazer]

Not everyone is afraid of showing who they really are.

The privacy issue is bigger than this, but this is what is at the heart of things like Facebook - unashamedness of who you really are, for the few who choose to embrace it.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point was that to date we have spent millions of years evolving to maximize our face to face social interactions.

That mostly seems to consist of throwing pointy things at one another...

Re:Facebook

[MrCrassic]

Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

See, here's the problem. Facebook isn't meant to replace social contact; it's meant to enhance it. When Zuckerberg and company began developing facebook (before the 'f' was capitalized, of course), their main impetus for doing so was to develop an easy way for people in Harvard to know and keep in contact with each other. Since college students would prefer anything online over in print, it made it a much better alternative than using the actual face-book that Harvard publishes every year (which I think they still do). On top of that, it provided a medium to allow people to contact each other easily. It was way better than digging through and through to find someone's email address, let alone their phone number. This obviously proved to be way more advantageous than finding people, as attested by the outrageous growth it's experienced since it went live in 2004.

Unfortunately, making communication easier naturally implies some form of increased isolation. However, would you really consider that mitigation a disadvantage if that simplification makes your life easier? Calling people makes it easier for me to not talk to the person face-to-face, but would you doubt that the phone is a terrible way to communicate with people because of that?

I own a Facebook profile, and have accumulated a ton of friends over the years on it. Now, in reality, I only know a handful of those folks...but having tons of Facebook friends sure makes it easy to find something to do on a quiet Friday/Saturday night if I'm up for it. Which, of course, makes it easy to make real acquaintances (or friends that stick around, if I get lucky).

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

So you're saying we should all move to your city? My whole country doesn't have enough people for two of those cities. And I bet in your country there are people who live in less populated zones...

The people I meet online are just that, people online. I don't pretend that we are BFFs.

Me too. But I do have friends who I have met in real life, but due to time constrains I can only hang out with on weekends. I don't see the problem with talking to them online on the rest of week.

I find Facebook flawed in multiple ways, but saying all online communication is impersonal and wrong is foolish.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's right. I give away ALL of my information on Facebook!

Seriously?

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause they don't care...and neither should you...It's not your information.

Re:Facebook

[Garth Smith]

I just moved to Berkeley less than a year ago and I didn't know a single soul up here. Facebook is great for remembering acquaintences you see, and then adding them as a friend gets some recognition between you and them. Without Facebook I wouldn't have been able to put names to faces nearly as quickly. For me, Facebook isn't for friends, it's for getting to know new people.

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

But you can say that about anything newer than a couple million years. We haven't evolved to use almost *none* of the stuff we use today.

The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions.

Bollocks. Evolution is not the only way to adapt. We have adapted to millions of changes without evolving. Sure, it's always a bumpy ride 'till we adapt, but it'll be measures in some years, not millions.

If you sum all the technological evolutions in the 19 and 20th centuries, this doesn't come even close.

Re:Facebook

[JoshuaZ]

Some of us have multiple passwords. Some intended for secure purposes and others not so. Also, the assumption that significant others won't care about these issues is at minimum obnoxious. If you think an issue matters, you should damn well make sure the people you care about understand the issue.

Re:Facebook

[Sir_Dill]

I like the direction you were both going for.

I agree that FB communication is a poor surrogate for face to face in person communication, however speaking from an American societal view, allowing people to communicate freely without some of the awkwardness or judgment based on physical appearances may allow people to "connect" with others and exchange ideas more freely.

Group social interaction and the sharing of ideas is what drives our society and civilization. To imply that the only way to do that is via "facetime" is not only naive, but its a little ignorant.

Yes body language can account for a significant amount of "communication" but it can also impede the sharing of ideas.

Personally I see FB as the next logical evolution to online disucssion forums and IRC chatrooms. The body language issue is largely negated through the use of "emoticons" and other memes, not to mention things like skype which I can tell you from experience, is an EXCELLENT alternative to face to face communication.

Ultimately FB allows more communication easier which will naturally lead to more physical interactions. The idea that just because you met someone on the internet discounts the possibility of being "friends" in real life is foolish. It's really no different than meeting someone on the train or in the grocery store. They are just as likely to be an axe murderer as the person you met online. The only difference is the method by which you were initially introduced. The same social rules and personal safety habits still apply and I think THAT is the larger issue. The internet has invaded every part of our lives at all levels. As a species we are still adjusting and evolving to take advantage of the new tools and communication avenues that have recently been created.

Re:Facebook

[Lumpy]

You are correct. it's not for /.'ers its for people that want to connect with others. I use it as a brand building tool and networking tool, same as my linked-in. I only post to my facebook positive things that build my "brand" to the point that I have over the past few years turned into a minor celebrity in some circles. A lot of people know of me that I don't know and they know my work, cripes little ol' me has 1500 fans on my fan page. It helps because only friends are on my page and everyone else sees my fan page. that allows me to insulate my private data stream from my public facing data stream.

THAT is what Facebook is really good at. mix in a twitter feed, youtube channel, and a "blog" that couples all together... and you have a HUGE brand building network.

It's also why I never even interviewed for my current job... I was contacted, they made an offer, I accepted and started. No interview, no Send your resume, no fill out a application...

p.s. : keep your social life not linked or not easily linked to your professional public facing world.

Re:Facebook

[patrikas]

Exactly.. after all it's monopoly and IMHO it's much more better to have many different community driven wiki-like sites/services having different goals. Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and friends, Slashdot :).. Music, event websites and so on. Facebook is obviously taking too much these days - net in the net.

Re:Facebook

[arogier]

Facebook isn't the social, its a simulation of the social. Hell, it might even be a simulacra of a simulation.

Re:Facebook

[RazorSharp]

That's a sorry excuse for supporting a POS like Zuckerberg. Especially for someone on Slashdot who is probably capable of creating their own website.

Personally, I will never compromise my integrity if it requires supporting an unethical company. For a while XBox Live was a big thing amongst my friends and they really pressured me to jump on the bandwagon, but I do not buy Microsoft products even if it means making some sacrifices.

When you knowingly support an unethical company you are being unethical yourself.

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

All online communication isn't wrong but giving away all of your information permanently is very wrong. Using IM such as IRC or AIM or sending long emails is a great way to share information and it doesn't get stored forever for randoms to see.

Re:Facebook

[kyrio]

Learn how Facebook works and you'll find that they do harvest ALL of your information.

Re:Facebook

[Hylandr]

However with facebook all of family and friends can be updated at once.
I hate repeating myself, and unless I rent a conference room at a hotel for daily family reunions facebook is the tool of choice.
There's nothing on facebook that couldn't be done with a variety of public information lookups anyways.
- Think about it -
- Dan.

Re:Facebook

[oldhack]

Hey, the man knows he's a broadcasting clown.

Re:Facebook

[icebraining]

Ok, with that I can agree (although that was not your argument in your first post): I don't really like Facebook. I especially don't like mixing multiples "types" of people in the same network.

I like IM and email for my friends and forums and IRC for more broad/anonymous discussions (where I don't divulge private information).

What bothers me is knowing that my almost empty Facebook page will probably be "used against me" in a future IT job.

Re:Facebook

[Subm]

I don't care for most of my cow-orkers, and have little time available to do much with my friends who live nearby.

Maybe if they stopped orking their cows you'd find more time for them.

Re:Facebook

[Faerunner]

That's great, but I doubt people "all over the world" are all awake and active at the computer when you are; that or you spend way too much time online. When I'm actually awake and at home (right now), my friend in NZ is not. Neither are my cousin in China or my sister in Colorado (she's in class). I can't use IM because nobody I actually want to talk to is online at the same times I am. Instead, I check Facebook for updates and use email for conversations. It's far more convenient, and it means that both my friends and I can actually go outside instead of waiting for someone to log into a messenger service.

Re:Facebook

[insertwackynamehere]

Cue Slashdot desperately trying to explain human social interaction through sputtering and rage. Typical Slashdotter: "Let's step back and precociously act as though we are not part of the human race. Let's argue about the common man's style of social interaction, something we have risen above by having no social interaction, PERIOD with the exception of posting on Slashdot. By the way, posting things on the internet is stupid, talk to your friends IRL, fagget!!1"

Re:Facebook

[insertwackynamehere]

Who are these CHUD people everyone on Slashdot claims to exist who communicate solely on Facebook from their underground lairs with no one on one social interaction whatsoever.

Everytime Facebook is mentioned here, a lot of people seem to create this strange stupid type of person who has 5 million friends on Facebook and talks to no one in real life. The fallacy of this is that the "person" being nerdraged against is a construct, it's easy to get mad at Facebook when you think these types of people exist and they are forced into their predicament by Zuckerberg's personal schutzstaffel. How about Slashdotter's stop freaking out about non-nerds communicating online and trying to explain from their position as a fucking Slashdot commenter that internet communication is inherently wrong.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Fight the power, you Internet Tough Guy you!

Re:Facebook

[Abstrackt]

We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.

Says the man posting on Slashdot

He dictated that post.

Re:Facebook

[insertwackynamehere]

I realize the OP was being a troll, but please mod the parent up. /.ers need this awareness. Facebook is not for /.ers, we are too cool to have friends.

FTFY

Re:Facebook

[AVryhof]

E-Megalomania.... people like to post to see themselves post.... it works on Slashdot too....look, I'm doing it now!

Re:Facebook

[insertwackynamehere]

Continue to rage againt the machine brah. Cut your internet btw, there is no way your ISP has clean hands. Also, you are correct I'm sure every Slashdotter has the resources and ability to recreate Facebook in a weekend, not to mention drum up a user base for it in a weekend or two. After all, all of us can make websites, right? Lemme brush up on my XHTML and I'll start a pure CSS based layout tonite. Larry, you get the database fleshed out! I'm thinking we use Django.. how about you guys?

Re:Facebook

[mea37]

Is this sarcasm? Trolling? I really can't tell.

Well, I use FB, and I don't give away ALL of my information. I publish the information I choose to. If there's something that I want to distribute to a limited audience but don't really care if it leaks, I post it with "friends only" security; if there's something I really want to maintain some sort of cnotrol over, it doesn't go on FB.

FB may not be the tool you want it to be, but that doesn't mean it's not a useful tool. You just hvae to know what it is and use it accordingly.

Re:Facebook

[mea37]

You're saying two conflicting things as though they were the same thing.

When you say facebook "is" pseudo-contact, you're wrong. Facebook is a tool. Some people use it for pseudo-contact, and if those people didn't have FB to use for pseudo-contact it's hard to predict what they'd do instead. As you yourself note, others use FB in positive ways; so why hate the tool just because some poeple use it wrong?

Also, I find your opinion that FB is only for one-way broadcast communication interesting, because it is completely unsupported by fact. Yes, FB has facilities for that; it also has facilities for person-to-person two-way communiction, which work quite well.

Re:Facebook

[JonStewartMill]

> a two way line of communication that doesn't save every letter we type to each other..

As far as you know.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

We "evolved" to be flexible. All of the social sciences blabber about evolution is really quite ridicilous.

Re:Facebook

[yusing]

We had real 'social contact' before the internet came along. So this must be about something else. And it feels more like herd to me.

Re:Facebook

[uniquegeek]

Or finding out some woman you don't know has three friends in common with you, all three of which don't know each other, two of which each live in different cities (and were previous boyfriends). This woman looks similar enough to me that we could be sisters. Cool and creepy, all at the same time.

I also found out one of my cousins (who I don't know that well) is a friend of one of my best friends.

I go dancing a lot, so once I start meeting more dancers and adding some of them, I get a whole list of other people I see but don't really know. I've met a few industry contacts that way, and found people who were into the same (other) hobbies I was. It is a great tool for meeting more people. Knowing you have something in common with someone makes it easier to break the ice with someone.

I also use facebook and my blog as a means of advertising my skills and interests. Personal marketing.

Re:Facebook

[elnyka]

Want to know what's much more social and stores none of your information for random strangers forever? Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!

Question: From where I am (Florida), how do I hang out with my friends, school buddies and relatives in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, Yokohama and Central America? Or do they stop being friends and relatives the moment they are no longer within spitting distance? It got to suck in a very insular way to not have people you care to hang out with but are very far away, in this modern, mobile and to a point, nomadic nation of ours. Either that, or you live in a cow town where everybody you know and care for enough to hang out with stays and dies on the same spot.

Here you are making the leap of thinking that all that information is available to random strangers (when in fact, that only happens if you consciously fiddle your privacy settings to make everything public.) Most people in Facebook do not do that, and, unlike Myspace (and the friend-whoring it seems to support), these same facebook users tend to keep visibility open only to actual friends, relatives and co-workers.

I'm a facebooker myself, some of my information is accessible by every one; other just to those I connect with. Fact is, I'm only connected with family, relatives and people I actually know. It's been the best thing since e-mail to keep in touch with relatives and friends thousands of miles away. With people that I've lost contact 10-15 years ago (by virtue of finishing school and/or migration) we have been able to re-found each others.

With it, and with skype, they have been great tools to communicate with faraway friends and family. It's the only way my grandma in Nicaragua and my in-laws in Japan can get regular, daily updates on my baby's growth. Networking sites are some of the best things that have come from the Internet in terms of human interaction.

When people start seeing those as ZOMG, GEEK+ATTENTIONWHORE, BASEMENT! ditching advise about getting out, that's just projecting.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the feeling the people you think are your friends consider you a trifling cunt with a bad attitude.

Re:Facebook

[Bing Tsher E]

allowing people to communicate freely without some of the awkwardness or judgment based on physical appearances may allow people to "connect" with others and exchange ideas more freely.

Or it may render people even less capable of communicating freely when physical appearance is a factor in the communication. It's a double edged sword. These things allow people to hole up in a cave and not deal with anybody else at all except in ways that they explicitly define and have control over. That's a hermit-like existence.

Re:Facebook

[elnyka]

Sounds to me like you have don't actually have any friends. All of your "hundreds of miles away" friends are just people you pretend are your friends because you believe they would actually be your friends if you were local to them

Speculation.

Chances are that isn't the case, you just happened to have a single common interest that connected you online.

See? More speculation, of which you are trying very hard to make it offensive simply because you have no way to defend your position with logic.

Your co-workers won't befriend you because you are boring (or a dumbass or rude or some other negative quality)

Projection. Strawman. Speculation. Offensiveness done simply because that's the only recourse you have when trying to defend an illogical, indefensible argument.

and your online friends would behave in the same fashion.

More speculation.

If you can't find time to hang out with your friends then you're doing something very wrong in life.

Some of those things that are being done wrong in life are having a family and kids, adjusting to a new location after moving from other place. I mean, seriously. The typical life of a college graduate is to move wherever works take you, sometimes across the country, far away from your parents and HS friends. Your college friends will also go their own way. This is not counting migrants or people married with people from other countries (whose friends and relatives you will befriend if you are normal.)

So either you didn't make lifelong lasting friends in HS and college (meaning, it is you who is doing something wrong in life.) Or you sever ties with friends the moment they end up in a state or city different from yours (which doesn't necessarily elicit an interesting and healthy way of life either.)

Again, stop projecting. The problem is not with them, it's with you.

Re:Facebook

[cbraescu1]

I hope to crash the party, but do you realize that on Facebook you won zilch? Not even your account?

Re:Facebook

[Bing Tsher E]

Continue to rage againt the machine brah. Cut your internet btw, there is no way your ISP has clean hands.

You don't seem to understand that we can wisely and selective decide how and where and with whom we associate.

So you fly off the handle and start mocking people who act in such a way.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you're in much of a position to criticize either, if we're going to get technical.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, you're one of those "Luddite" people I keep hearing about. What are you doing on a computer, shouldn't you be off at a barn-raising or fucking a goat?

Re:Facebook

[Ihmhi]

Moreover, I'm fine with making the "targeted marketing" compromise that my data is inevitably used for.

More often than not, when I want to buy something I go out and buy it. If I learn of something that's good via advertising, so much the better - but I will still independently research it to see if it is worth my money.

The whole marketing thing doesn't really impact me personally so I don't have as much of a problem with my personal information being up there.

Re:Facebook

[Daengbo]

You know what? I have met hundreds of friends from tens of countries. I was an expat for ten years, and other expats tended to come and go every year. We used FB to organize events, and it was useful.

Still, once they left to go back home, 98% of them got the boot from my friend list because I knew that I'd never see them again. Heck, I barely saw some if them when they were in country. I once told one of them "Don't take this the wrong way, but tou're going to leave and I'm never going to see you again. Yeah, you'll want to keep in touch, but you won't and I won't, either. In effect, you're dead to me." (Ironically, I actually follow this gal's blog and we chat every once in a while -- she even visited me and stayed at my place.)

For the three or five who don't fit the mold, I've got e-mail. My gal, though ... she's a Facebook stalker. She still knows what every one of them is doing, where they live, and who they are dating. She rarely talks to any of them, though.

Re:Facebook

[Sir_Dill]

I can concede your point, however, hermits by definition don't interact with anyone in any way. (Hermit-like I know I know, I would have said recluse but that's just me)

There will always be people who choose to remove themselves from the social structure of the society in which they live, is Facebook a direct contributor? Perhaps but its not really a question that can be answered with generalizations.

I would argue that any interaction with another person is better than none.

I am not just talking about people who have "issues" though. I am talking about the mixing of social castes and exposure to outside ideas that seems to come with the internet.

I am getting a little off topic here, but consider this, the internet is the only truely democratic social group in existence on this planet. No single entity can control or monitor it and I would argue that what is found on the internet is the true nature of man. The fact that FB causes so much drama and provides so much insight into humankind as a whole is no surprise.

Murdoch knows he is sitting on a goldmine of data. FB and twitter and the like can be used to predict how successful that which affects our culture will be. As a data nerd myself I have wet dreams about mining the data on facebook, learning how personal tastes vary by region. I think that's one reason we have so much controversy in the world because opinions and values are highly dependent upon geographic location. You might be saying "DUH" at this point but I don't think many other people are. I think that the average FB user may have considered this but really has no idea what it means. If I could get my hands on it with names, email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses removed, I think it would be compelling to say the least....especially to a company looking to sell a product.

The word lucrative doesn't even begin to explain it.

Re:Facebook

[ajlisows]

Note that I am not really a huge fan of Facebook but it does serve its purpose. While I was in college and into my late twenties I saw almost all of my friends very often. Now I am just a tad past 30 and things have changed. One of my best friends since I was 7 is now married, has a wife and a child, and lives 5 hours away. Three of my better friends have one or more children and one of them works a shift completely that makes is hard for us to ever get together. A lot of the friends that used to live less than five minutes away now live 30-60 minutes away. We all have more things that get in the way of hanging out with each other.

That does not mark the end of our friendships. It just makes the more challenging. It is nice to go onto Facebook and post "I'm thinking of having a game of Hold 'Em at my place this Saturday...anybody in?" It is of course preferable to speak with my friends face to face, but when it isn't possible I would rather drop them an EMAIL or Facebook Private Message along the lines of "Did you see Last night's baseball game?" or "Did you and your daughter end up catching any fish this Saturday" or "Looks like the health care bill passed. What do you think of it?" instead of not communicating with them at all.

Trust me. People get older. Responsibilities change. Your time to "Hang out" shrinks significantly. Life just changes. I used to laugh at people over 30 who never seemed to do anything "Fucking awesome" like I did almost every night. Now I understand.

Re:Facebook

[gullevek]

Well the "why does this person know my friend" is often very surprising.

Last time I met a girl on a party and when I later added her on facebook I found out she is a good friend of a friend of mine.

Or once two of my friends both wrote a comment to one of my post and found out that they were former classmates. Facebook can be fun.

As long as you shut out any of the default "optin" stuff that promotes your profile to outside search or links with some "webservice foo"

Re:Facebook

[joss]

That makes perfect sense to me, what I'm unclear on is how to keep the social life and professional facing world separated. Once on facebook as oneself, my actual friends would friend me, they post photos of events, I might be in those photos.. etc etc. As a non-user of FB, who has played with it a little via friends' accounts, it seems to suck people in and in no time at all other people are revealing all sorts of stuff that one might wish to keep private. How do you manage it ?

Re:Facebook

[joss]

And discretion on behalf of everyone else.

Re:Facebook

[hkmwbz]

I think the point was that to date we have spent millions of years evolving to maximize our face to face social interactions.

Tell that to people with social phobia.

The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions

How?

Re:Facebook

[RockDoctor]

You only give away the information that you choose to give away.
Having said that, I think I'll go and modify some more (to make it hard-to-parse for the machines) and ban a few dozen adverts as either uninteresting or irrelevant (there is no other category that advertising fits into). And when it folds ... who'll care?

and again....

[Em Emalb]

no mention of user security ANYWHERE.

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.

Re:and again....

[King_TJ]

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Re:and again....

[Monkeedude1212]

Both with Privacy AND with security.

I mean, from a business standpoint, yes, facebook is great for drumming up marketting, developing business, and maintaining relations with clients. However, just yesterday we ran across this little gem. A worm that targets facebook and other social networking sites specifically.

Surprise Surprise, one our sales ladies got infected. Now that we've cleaned it off we still have to assess the damage. She could have spread it to the rest of the sales team, her clients, the CEO (who is on her friends list)... But of course she isn't going to give US any information, that'd be invading her privacy.

I know, you guys are going to say "Tell her to warn others and let her deal with it then", which is what we did, but obviously if she doesn't adequately deal with it, the problem is going to circle back to us with other sales people.

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd like to be paid royalties for the information I provide FB.

I'll trade accurate information for cash. In lieu of that, I shall remain a resident of 123 Main Street.

Re:and again....

[MikeBabcock]

Facebook has pretty good security features if you turn them on.

That said, turning them all on makes the whole service pretty pointless.

Re:and again....

[Monkeedude1212]

It doesn't stop facebook from being the vector & entry point for malware.

Re:and again....

[caffeinemessiah]

One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies". Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume. The term has been abused by the popular media in connection with the NSA's wiretapping, but people tend to overlook the fact that "data mining" is just a bunch of algorithms to find statistical patterns in different kinds of data. When it's referred to as "exploratory data analysis", no one seems to mind. When it's referred to as simply "applied statistics", no one seems to mind. Read the statement by ACM's data mining special interest group, SIGKDD.

That said, I completely agree with you -- of course Facebook is interested in mining the social graph and f***ing it for all its worth. They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions. Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset. For a capitalist country, a lot of nerds in the US seem to have rose-colored glasses on.

Re:and again....

[corbettw]

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

OMG! One of the people who invested in Facebook has political views you don't like! It's the end of the world! Facebook are a bunch of racists and only a racist would ever use them!

Re:and again....

[biryokumaru]

anti-multicultural tome

That is quite possibly the most loaded rhetoric I've seen in a while.

Re:and again....

[megamerican]

Not only that, but the founder Mark Zuckerberg has no problem hacking into other people's accounts. He came up with facebook while working on a similar project for others at Harvard. Evidence shows that he stalled his work on the other project while working on Facebook while stringing along the others. I certainly wouldn't trust a backstabbing jackass like Zuckerberg with my information. It is why I deleted my facebook account almost a year ago.

Re:and again....

[Pojut]

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

I am an avid Facebook user (5-10+ updates a day kinda guy), but that quote from your post is exactly why I never say or do anything on there I care about the public knowing. I'm fully aware that nothing I do on there is truly private, and I use it with that in mind.

Re:and again....

[Nadaka]

I don't know, if facebook was a data mining front for the CIA, I would hope that they would be interested in keeping their valuable intel to themselves. Unless of course they are merely using the insecurity of the system to gather intel instead of having an official back door.

Re:and again....

[anglico]

you live there too? Funny I've never seen you around the house?

Re:and again....

[icebraining]

Since politics is (currently) largely based on who has more money, by using their services you're indirectly voting for them.

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Facebook accounts don't get 'deleted'. Go ahead and try, you can probably still sign in to your old account with the same password.

Because of this, I recommend to people that they falsify all of their information on Facebook before they try to delete their account.

Re:and again....

[tlhIngan]

no mention of user security ANYWHERE.

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.

What security is there in the first place? You put up a private photo and expect that only your friends see it? And that maybe they're all too stupid to "save as" and re-post the photo elsewhere as a public photo?

The privacy settings are just feel-good measures. Post something good and unless you have no friends, someone's probably going to re-post it elsewhere. Of course, if people realized this all the "private" data on Facebook wouldn't be there, so you put up some basic crap that really doesn't do anything. Once it's on the 'net, it's out there, no matter the privacy settings. The only way to keep it off is to not post it in the first place.

To think otherwise is like those "image DRM," "document DRM" and "email DRM" type services out there claiming to keep your images, documents, and emails safe from third parties/leaks, and allowing things like "expiring" content.

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I fail to see how that worm is any different than IM and e-mail viruses. Facebook and MySpace are just now popular enough that their messaging systems are viable delivery methods for e-mail viruses.

Viruses of that type are an entirely social problem: they simply ask the user to infect their computer with the virus and the user does so. It is either the user's responsibility to not install viruses or IT's responsibility to not allow arbitrary executables to be run (which may not apply if the virus only gets install to users' home computers).

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

with the possible exception of "most loaded rhetoric"

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

That is quite possibly the most loaded rhetoric I've seen in a while.

The subtitle of the book is "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford". So I guess it's just the word "tome" that you are objecting to?

Re:and again....

[dc29A]

Yes you can.

Re:and again....

[Monkeedude1212]

You can scan and filter incoming and outgoing IM protocols easily with a good firewall.

Despite what you may believe, you can infect a computer without running an executable.

I can either blacklist facebook (which will upset our employees who use it for business) or I can try my best at blacklisting the sites they get redirected to, but thats a never ending game of cat and mouse.

IM and email viruses are one point of entry that is easy to handle. We run our email server, and block hotmail, gmail, and yahoo. IM applications are not allowed. Anytime a new application wants to access outside our firewall, we get prompted and only after we allow access can it get through.

These are vectors we can control. The better part of it is that they are not necessary for business. They HAVE an email address at the company. We can keep viruses off of that. They don't need an IM to their clients, the email server can handle the back-and-forth. Facebook and Myspace, its either 100% open floodgate or nothing at all. But for whatever reason its deemed necessary to use.

Re:and again....

[bigdavex]

That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.

Absolutely. I don't have a facebook account for this reason.

The end users aren't Facebook's customers.

Re:and again....

[Pollardito]

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Yes! Because if just anyone can connect to Facebook and grab all your data, then there is no reason for them to pay Facebook for a copy of all your data

Re:and again....

[RazorSharp]

One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset.

What's shocking is that everyone knows Facebook does this crap and uses their service anyway. If consumers took more of an active interest in what corporations they supported then companies wouldn't get away with this crap.

Re:and again....

[Abcd1234]

What's shocking is that everyone knows Facebook does this crap and uses their service anyway.

Why is that shocking? Maybe users have *gasp* different priorities than you do! I know, it's shocking!

For example, I don't care that Facebook knows the people I'm related to. They provide me a service, and I pay them by providing them with information they deem valuable. I consider that an equitable trade. Who the hell are you to decide I can't make that judgment for myself?

Frankly, I'm continually amused by how much smarter Slashdotters think they are than the general public, and how they seem to believe they know what's best for them. So much for that supposed libertarian streak around here...

Re:and again....

[rhizome]

Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume.

Look, we as nerds must STOP latching on to one facet of an argument, or at least representing it as the entire argument. The difference is DM in the context of ex-CIA, not DM in general. Relax, coffeeboy.

Re:and again....

[insertwackynamehere]

You sound like a right wing politician. FFS why has Slashdot become such a technophobic community? Why is Facebook and Apple constantly maligned for what they do? You do realize how close minded and ignorant it sounds to say things like this right?

Re:and again....

[yusing]

"Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset."

Where'd you get the idea that anyone (many) are "shocked" about it? It's just that their approach to the net is not part of the vision that many people have for the net. Any more than today's Wall Street is part of the vision most people have for the US.

Not that that should stop them ... but they sure can't expect most people to applaud. While they can rope in people who no reason to suspect what they're up to and why, they're going to be missing a very significant part of the big picture - anyone who has a reason not to play. Combine that with the fact that their statistics are going to be about as valuable as modern economics, and I expect that they'll only enrich themselves until their product is recognized as being transitory and vapid.

Re:and again....

[Deosyne]

Why are you letting the terrorists into your computer?!? FOR THE CHILDREN!!!

Re:and again....

[prostoalex]

Accel also invested in Foundry Networks and 2Wire.
Serving on a board of a random association is a super-strong tie, shouldn't Accel be funneling the data to The Man on the router level though?

Re:and again....

[prostoalex]

Semiconductors were invented by a man with some pretty wild ideas. I'm assuming you whole-heartedly support them, as you have voted with your money for products containing semiconductors.

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?

I know its slashdot but this is one of the more ridiculous arguments I have seen:
1) if you take money from from someone who is "antimulticultural" then you must not be for individual privacy rights (to say nothing of imputing that Peter Thiel is against privacy rights)
2) if you take money from someone who SITS ON A BOARD with other venture capitalists one of whom was funded by the CIA then you are against privacy rights

Talk about guilt by association four levels removed.

Re:and again....

[pydev]

They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions

My personal information is no more "their asset" than my phone calls are the asset of the phone company. They should be a communication service, and they shouldn't "mine" anybody's data except as necessary to allow me to communicate with others as I see fit.

Re:and again....

[pydev]

For the same reason we use Microsoft, iPhone, and other crap: these companies have a near-monopoly.

And to keep them from abusing it, the public needs to regulate them.

Re:and again....

[splatter]

I always preferred "massaging the data". Sounds much more relaxing and peaceful doesn't it?

Re:and again....

[icebraining]

Since he died way when I was a few months old, I think I'm in the clear.

Besides, I'm not saying you're wrong to buy the stuff, or that I wouldn't do it. It's not a judgmental call, it's a fact.

Companies get their money from us.
Companies use their money to support politicians they want.

Ergo, by giving those companies money, you're indirectly affecting which politicians/policies will be implemented.

Re:and again....

[wall0159]

"Relax, coffeeboy."

Reminds me of a Tori Amos lyric:
"you sign 'Prince Of Darkness,' more like: 'Squire Of Dimness'"

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

like

Re:and again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it a step further, FB will become if it is already not. The most popular, used and accessed SN. It will be available through every media device, including internet tv which means that FB will become the Largest database of personal information in world.

I for one cannot understand why Social networking is so popular. Not to be blunt, but i find those people with lives rarely if ever check their FB accounts.

And most times browse once a week to check in with people from way back. The majority of comments on all SN are foolish and silly, "I ate PBJ today for lunch, it was yummy" Really!? Who gives a shit, really. Whether anyone will admit or agree, SN is not really a good idea. Our society is barely able to communicate now. People hide their feelings for decades until they die unhappy and miserable because they never opened their mouths about Love, Life, Being happy, being unhappy, their kids, whatever.

SN only advantage as that it allows agoraphobics a chance to speak with the outside world about the size of their bowl movements.

The scary part is, with the FB reach they will know the size, shape and smell of your movements before you even post it.

The only facebook I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the Necronomicon.

Re:The only facebook I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the single-most innovative comment for this story.

It's a land grab

[bobetov]

They aren't satisfied with knowing (and using to advertise and monetize) your social network. Now, they want us, 3rd party web devs, to help them figure out what other sites you visit, what type of music you like to listen to, and what movies you've watched recently.

So they can advertise and monetize it.

I'm not seeing a real good reason to add this "Like" thing on any site of mine. I'd rather my visitors build *my* site's community, rather than simply acting as a source of content and demographics info for Facebook.

Re:It's a land grab

[Skreems]

It's a question of intent. If you have aspirations of building a community, it's worth your time to make those features yourself, and figure out how to advertise. If, on the other hand, you just want to reach as many people as possible, "Like on Facebook" allows you to hook into their network and prompt people to share your stuff with others. I don't see myself needing it, but as free advertising goes it's pretty slick.

Re:It's a land grab

[bbqsrc]

What he said is entirely valid, and it really brings nothing new to the market. Digg and Reddit, and even Twitter have cornered this market for a long time have they not?

Re:It's a land grab

[hesaigo999ca]

They want to be in line with google in terms of ad awareness for their clients and users.
which ads do we serve, lets mine their data, analyse, then next time they use their facebook accounts...
low and behold, they will see ads meant for them , customized as google does.
Nothing wrong with them wanting to make money, when facebook is free, it is the only way they get to feed their families.

Signal to Noice Ratio

[rwv]

I'm as big a fan of social media as the next guy, but unless Facebook is planning to solve the "signal-to-noise" problem the future of their platform will be severely limited.

Re:Signal to Noice Ratio

[edmicman]

Isn't the signal to noise on Facebook directly related to the people you "friend"? I don't get spammed by complete strangers, and the people I get tired of seeing pictures of babies and games for get blocked, hidden, or removed from my list. It's not Facebook's problem that your friends blow up your timeline with a bunch of crap....

Re:Signal to Noice Ratio

[rwv]

It's not Facebook's problem that your friends blow up your timeline with a bunch of crap....

Yes, I have "friends" who regularly post trivial garbage to their newsfeed. The same people also make noteworthy posts on occasion. If Facebook (or any other social network site) provided a clear set of configurable settings to quiet these people (perhaps hiding their chatter in a link called "Click here to expand [4] discussions started by John Smith in the last 24 hours".

I would like to apply this behavior towards all my friends who have posted at least three times a week for the last three weeks.

enough with farmville?

[Anonymous Coward]

negative, click here to feed my chickens, BITCH.

Re:enough with farmville?

[PaulMeigh]

Aw come on, not +1 Funny? Vulgar farmville jokes should be exempt from the troll mod.

Haters

[Enderandrew]

He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.

If I like a song on Pandora, it can link to my Facebook profile. Great, I can spam my wall and annoy my friends even more!

Facebook is the single most popular site on the world, in spite of itself. All they do is piss off their users. Some day it will blow up in their face when someone launches something better.

Re:Haters

[maxume]

Mod parent DOWN.

Re:Haters

[MadKeithV]

Well played, well played. Shame the moderators didn't seem to get it.

Re:Haters

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, grandparent down.

Re:Haters

[beakerMeep]

Apparently there also needs to be a 'golfclap' button.

Re:Haters

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, there are other ways of showing dislike.

Re:Haters

[maxume]

Well, either they didn't get it, or they wanted to show everybody that they did get it.

Re:Haters

[mounthood]

He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.

I think you missed the point: Corporations want to know what you like, they don't care about what you dislike.

Re:Haters

[Anonymous Coward]

He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.

Thank God.

(and I don't even believe in God)

Re:Haters

[Enderandrew]

The value of a social network is in the users. Myspace was the indisputed king of social networks, and drove people away. Facebook replaced them.

Personally, I don't want or care about a dislike button. I'm pointing out that Facebook is constantly going in the opposite direction of what users want. Sooner or later, they will drive people away and someone else will replace Facebook, just as Facebook replaced Myspace.

Wow. Google BUZZ must be thrilled

[VShael]

I was wondering what new madness would finally force the Facebook herd to move to another pasture.

This looks like it.

Re:Wow. Google BUZZ must be thrilled

[Monkeedude1212]

Buzz doesn't have farmville. Until you see another site that has such strong developer support for applications, you won't see Facebook dethroned.

Re:Wow. Google BUZZ must be thrilled

[edmicman]

Last I knew Buzz was also tied to Gmail. Not all of my friends have Gmail, some have their own email addresses and probably don't want to sign up for Google's just to use Buzz. I use Gmail for email, Twitter for its niche, and Facebook for its own use. Until Buzz gets decoupled into a standalone service I don't see it competing much with Twitter even, let alone Facebook.

Great.

[Fnkmaster]

Now when I go to CNN.com I suddenly find information about my "friends" and their activities on CNN.com. I don't want to see this shit. And I sure as hell don't want my "friends" (keeping in mind that the several hundred FB-friends I have aren't particularly my real 'friends' anyway) seeing what I do on CNN.com.

The worst thing - this is happening even though I disabled the only privacy setting on Facebook that I could find related to sharing information with third party websites. And even though I never opted in to Facebook Connect or connected CNN.com to Facebook.

Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature. The only way I could disable it was to log out of my Facebook account manually on Facebook.com. I didn't have a browser open at Facebook mind you, I just had a cookie in my browser from having logged into Facebook earlier this morning at the office.

So now Facebook forces me to log out manually every time I leave the site lest I be barraged with Facebook content on other, completely unrelated, websites. Thanks, but no fucking thanks. I guarantee I won't be logging into Facebook anywhere near as often any more since they've made their service an utter pain in the ass now.

Call me a grumpy old 30-year old man if you will. I probably am. Get off my lawn and all that. But seriously, I was an early adopter of Facebook, and before that of Friendster. I enjoy seeing a little bit of mindless drivel from my acquaintances and the like out there, and keeping in touch on my terms is nice, but it has to be on my terms. I'm not interested in having my web browsing at work be a social experience - I prefer to keep my "social experiences" sandboxed to the websites they originate from, thank you very much.

Re:Great.

[Rhaban]

Easy solution: remove all your facebook "friends" who are not real friends.

Re:Great.

[jonpublic]

Use a browser dedicated to facebook. I upped my privacy settings as high as they go and I use a browser specifically only for facebook.

Re:Great.

[icebraining]

Keep a different browser profile for FB alone, to maintain their cookies isolated.

Re:Great.

[FreonTrip]

I'm in the same boat. This was originally a site designed to help people stay in touch with one another, but the company's desire to monetize its data is making them drift further and further from that goal. I don't care that a friend of mine became a fan of Fluffy Bunnies and Toe Socks, or that they befriended a number of people I've never heard of, and I really won't care that they visited musicalclusterfuck.net and Liked a pop country band, or that they frequent Fox News. It's well on its way to becoming a malware-crawling, adfotainment hellhole... really the ultimate manifestation of Eternal September, with lots of well-moneyed players swarming on its back like a Surinam toad of e-commerce.

Re:Great.

[gclef]

I ended up AdBlocking a bunch of facebook URLs to solve this. Annoying, but it did work. The ones I blocked:

http://connect.facebook.net/*
  http://www.facebook.com/connect/*
  http://www.facebook.com/plugins/*
  http://www.facebook.com/ajax/connect/*
  http://www.facebook.com/connect.php/js/FB.SharePro/
  http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?*

(PS: why does slashcode convert text-only URLs into hyperlinks inside a blockquote?)

Re:Great.

[hey]

Use on browser for Facebook (eg Chrome) and another for the rest of the web (eg Firefox).
Actually that would be a nice browser feature ("Keep site logins separate").

Re:Great.

[The Lerneaen Hydra]

If you use Firefox then check out the very nice greasemonkey script fluffbuster purity; http://www.fbpurity.com/. It gives you selective control of all the bull that fills up Facebook. (There's some interesting reading there too regarding what facebook thinks of that script...)

Re:Great.

[gclef]

Fluffbuster won't stop the integrations from loading on sites like CNN, though, nor will it stop URL from loading even on facebook. Greasemonkey scripts run *after* the page loads...so if you're uncomfortable with the tracking between cnn and facebook, for example, you need to stop the facebook integration URLs from loading in the first place (hence my AdBlocking comment above).

Don't get me wrong: I like FBPurity, and I use FBPurity. But it won't fix this particular problem.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple solution...don't use Facebook. Call people. Go visit them. Invite them over.

What a waste of computer cycles to spend time socializing on the internet.

Go hang out with some humans.

Re:Great.

[Abcd1234]

Simple solution...don't use Facebook. Call people. Go visit them. Invite them over.

What a waste of computer cycles to spend time socializing on the internet.

Go hang out with some humans.

Says the guy socializing with people on Slashdot. Oh the hypocrisy of it all...

Re:Great.

[Abcd1234]

Excellent tip, thanks! Now if someone created an AdBlock subscription service for this filter list... :)

Re:Great.

[insertwackynamehere]

You are an AC on Slashdot.

Re:Great.

[Fnkmaster]

Thanks for the excellent suggestion! I added these to my AdBlock filter list and it seems to have successfully blocked the Facebook crud from CNN.com. I assume it will do the same for other sites that seem to think this is a feature. Moreover, it doesn't seem like this breaks anything on Facebook itself (at least from a cursory examination - no promises).

Re:Great.

[Asterisk]

I think this is a core problem with monetizing social media in general.

In traditional media, you create and distribute content, and perhaps monetize it by delivering ads to your customers. Here, you as the media provider are engaged in a conversation with your users. Even if it's a bit of a one-sided conversation, the content stream that you are providing is what delivers value to the users, so if you can insert ads into that stream without driving customers away, you make a profit.

With social media, you are providing a platform upon which your users interact and communicate. They are there to converse with each other, not to consume your content stream. If you attempt to monetize your service by inserting your own content into the conversation, you are effectively *interrupting the conversation* and distracting them away from the activities that make them value the service in the first place.

The way Twitter, Facebook, etc. are attempting to monetize their services is less like interspersing a TV broadcast with commercials, and more like sitting down at someone's table in a restaurant and shouting "Hey! Look at me! Over here!". Facebook is a bit more clever about it, and design the structure of their service so that it generates a spamflood from the users themselves, but the end result is the same.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

(keeping in mind that the several hundred FB-friends I have aren't particularly my real 'friends' anyway) seeing what I do on CNN.com.

Then why bother having them as "friends" if they aren't "friends"? Or not not just go into your preferences and filter out what people do and don't see? Nobody gets spammed with every little inane detail on every inane facebook app I use, because I have it set not to, in fact, nothing I do that doesn't involve directly interracting with someone else (wall post, tagging, comments, like, etc) doesn't show up on my feed - there's an option for that you know.

Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature

But Facebook itself probably does.

So now Facebook forces me to log out manually every time I leave the site lest I be barraged with Facebook content on other, completely unrelated, websites.

Well, that's pretty much the point of SSN, and FB-Connect at its core really is what something like OpenID and MSN Passport/LiveID should have been. Given that it's a SSN mecghanism, uncheck the "log me in automatically" box on FB, there, you're done.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's even worse than that.

I noticed that on web sites that have enabled the new "Like" facebook buttons, it is aware of who you are even if you're not logged in to facebook.

You have to delete your facebook cookie or use a completely separate browser.

Otherwise facebook is aware of any web site you visit that they have the Like button on and what you do on there, even if you logged out of facebook.

Re:Great.

[Fnkmaster]

That's reasonable advice, but it just addresses an aside comment I made, not the actual point.

Furthermore, as advice, it greatly oversimplifies the nature of human relationships. While it's possible to be more fine-grained on Facebook, by far the easiest things to do are to share stuff with everybody or nobody. As a result, I generally opt for nobody (i.e. real, personal information doesn't get posted by me to Facebook any more, and I have my account privacy settings completely locked down now).

Furthermore there are people like business contacts, associates, acquaintances - people I know, and might talk to when I see them at a party, but they aren't the first people I'd pick up a phone and call if the shit hit the fan in my life. The information I want to share with them is different from what I'd share with a good friend.

And unless you are a habitual oversharer, there is essentially no cost to leaving people as "friends" on Facebook - unless they are annoying updaters, in which case I simply block their info from my feed. Fine, that's solved.

But there is a real cost to actually de-friending people who are within your real life social networks, even if you do not consider them friends any more. The cost is the awkwardness and embarrassment that can ensue from them knowing they have been de-friended by you. Unless they are so creepy that you want absolutely nothing to do with them, the harm from allowing them to continue as your Facebook "friend" is minimal. De-friending people you really never see or relate to, and don't like - sure, that's easy enough.

Additionally, it is very awkward to ignore friend invitations from people. The only people I actively refuse Friend invites from are a couple of folks I really strongly dislike who just don't get that I don't like them, and from my ex-girlfriends (and people I actually don't know).

These days, if I actually want to share pictures with my friends, I upload them to Picasa, make a private album, and give access to the people I want to have access to them and email those people a link. Much safer than putting stuff on Facebook where privacy settings and access control are in constant flux and the site defaults everything to share with everybody. And if I want to share personal information with a group of friends, I send an email.

Facebook is just something to idly gawk at, and to "microblog" some clever but completely irrelevant and impersonal bullshit you found online in your status line.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature. The only way I could disable it was to log out of my Facebook account manually on Facebook.com. I didn't have a browser open at Facebook mind you, I just had a cookie in my browser from having logged into Facebook earlier this morning at the office.

The only cookie workaround you have is to sign into Facebook, which is a secondary type of site from a secondary browser on your PC.
Use your main browser for your primary sites. Competing browsers currently have no intention of sharing your cookies, so you'll be protected from snooping.

Re:Great.

[Hurricane78]

Because the comment format dropdown (left of the preview button) Is buggy for a couple of years now. (>5 years!)
“Plain old text” actually is Extrans. And Extrans is “plain old text”, as far as I know.
I never bothered to figure it all out. I just know that I can use HTML in p.o.t., but not in extrans, last time I checked.

Taco doesn’t seem to care, or even notice...

Re:Great.

[jubishop]

You can control this. Just look closer in the privacy settings.

Holy fuck. No more "platforms", please!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a whole generation of developers and managers who witnessed Microsoft rise to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to Windows.

Since then, the main goal of these developers and managers hasn't been to create applications that actually let people get more work done faster, but rather they've focused on building "platform" after "platform", to try and put themselves in the same monopoly position that Microsoft was/is in.

The thing is, we don't need any more platforms. We have too many, as it is. What's worse, each higher-level platform gets shittier and shittier than the one below it. Developing Facebook "apps", for instance, is just shittier and highly-restricted web application development. Web application development is just shittier and restricted desktop application development. Desktop application development is just shittier and restricted command line application development.

At the command line platform, at least the benefits of not having to interface directly with hardware and being able to reuse very generic code do exceed the stuff we can't do. We just don't see that once we get higher, though.

All these fools with their "platforms" need to fuck right off. Bring us a useful product, not another "platform" that's a shittier foundation than everything that has come before it.

The Newest and Social Way to Exploit the Masses

[Anonymous Coward]

This new vision leaves me troubled. The way he envisions it, it will be a wet dream to advertisers. Facebook wants to know what you really like in order for you to buy. Only this time, there will be greater transparency. I use Fb to keep up with friends. I don't care what crap they buy. Maybe teen age girls will like this sort of thing. I always see those stooges on Fb joining groups about how Fb will start charging a monthly service. Fb will never charge. If they do, people will leave. People tolerate the advertising since they have no choice.

Re:The Newest and Social Way to Exploit the Masses

[icebraining]

This new vision leaves me troubled. The way he envisions it, it will be a wet dream to advertisers.

You don't use NoScript, do you? Because if you did, you'd see that his "dream" is Google's reality. google-analytics.com is *everywhere*.

Re:The Newest and Social Way to Exploit the Masses

[Anonymous Coward]

Blocking all Javascript just to get rid of googleanalytics is overkill. Just use your hosts file or CustomizeGoogle.

Quote FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, fuck Facebook. Seriously. - Stan Marsh

Re:Quote FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward likes this.

social graph

[jDeepbeep]

The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like

So in other words, not much has changed. Zuckerberg has been talking about his social 'graph' for years now. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Re:social graph

[moeinvt]

"Nothing to see here folks. Move along."

Agreed. Call it the Alt-F9 conference.

Social Spam

[cosm]

I find it easiest to not participate. When I was in high-school and Facebook was just a whisper, during the times in which the only allowed users had to have educational email addresses, it was a platform for communication. Now it has become a micro-blogging service on the public side, so people can quantitatively spew their opinions via 'like' or, well, frankly, 'like'. Facebook is a platform of subjective opinions, coalescing, as a previous poster states precisely, into a a very large amount of noise compared to a very small amount of signal.

In theory, a 'clean' social networking site would simple allow people to communicate with exactly who they want in a manner that is explicitly controllable, giving that user the ability to control the exact verbosity of their messages and their communication scope. Facebook is eliminating the paradigm of private opinions, and the more laymen that sign up, more noise pervades the wire.

The draw, the appeal have you, is simple. If you can quantize 'friendships' and social-connections, people now have a semi-definable metric that they sub-consciously always try to improve, this is human nature. People seek others to listen to their opinions, and therefore the underlying motivation on Facebook is that drives people to produce so much noise is this need to be heard, even if what they have to say is completely worthless from a societal contribution standpoint. Its easy. You just post, and Facebook does the rest. If I am giving a speech to room full of empty people, I know nobody will hear it. But if I am printing my speech on millions of fliers and jetting them all over the world, their is that chance that somebody will effectively 'hear' me. Facebook provides, the pen, the paper, the microphone, the jet, and fuel, they own the airlines, they own the airports, and now they want to connect their 'communication hub' to every-other preexisting communication hub so that you can see that Joe Schmoe just mowed his lawn or Pookie made a cute face while she crapped on the apartment floor.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Re:Social Spam

[cosm]

"room full of empty people"

I know self-replies are not in good taste, but this has a hilariously different meaning than what I meant to type, but perhaps still relevant to my point in reference to types of people that do in fact care about Pookie's facial expressions during her bowel movements.

Re:Social Spam

[six11]

I thought that 'room full of empty people' thing was +1 Insightful, actually. My FB friends are people, yes, but they're empty.

Re:Social Spam

[MrCrassic]

Here's the thing I don't get about the people that hate Facebook because of the News Feed. If reading other people's status updates is so annoying, then why can't one just ignore them?

Re:Social Spam

[FreonTrip]

Hamster eyes, I call it.

You start a conversation with that round of duckspeak so popular in America, the circular "Hi-how-are-you, oh-great-what-about-you" routine that constitutes a greeting, and talk with them one on one about something inoffensive - that episode of Family Guy, or the weather, or how the Saints/Manchester/$CITYNAMESPORTSTEAM are doing this season, and the responses are polite but kinda short and airy. Then you try to talk about something deeper, and... there's nothing going on behind the eyes. Maybe they weren't bright to begin with, or squandered their youthful potential before taking a soul-sucking job, or killed it with booze and drugs, or were just hatefully boring from the moment they left the womb, but that singular spark of mental liveliness just isn't there. You Friend them out of some sense of obligation - maybe they're an acquaintance of your SO's, or you run into them just often enough that ignoring their requests would risk offending them, but they're sucking voids trying to fill themselves with garbage, and they stop to regurgitate context-free shrapnel from their endless feasting just often enough to remind you of their profound and utter worthlessness.

It will not surprise you to know that I recommend avoiding these people. :)

Re:Social Spam

[CrackedButter]

If I give you a knife and you kill somebody, its not the knifes fault, it's yours. If you sign up loads of friends on facebook and they all talk shit, that isn't facebook's faults it's all your friends who want to talk shit.

Re:Social Spam

[CrackedButter]

You can and I do.

Re:Social Spam

[edmicman]

You just described the Internet. Yay?

Re:Social Spam

[cosm]

The problem with that metaphor is that in real-life, the victim can explicitly express their dislike towards the knife, preventing further knifing. On Facebook, you cannot dislike the 'knife' that represents incoherent babble without spending serious time navigating their draconian account settings. I am being facetious of course (no pun intended) .

But in all seriousness, any attempt at eliminating the noise always eliminates any possibility of recieving quality signals on Zuckerberg's greedchild-cross-panopticon.

Re:Social Spam

[Asterisk]

I agree. I think modern social media have worked against the internet as a genuinely emergent social platform. The nature of the communities and the depth of the discourse on sites like Slashdot, HN, Ars Technica, even Reddit, the informal message boards and IRC channels, and many corners of the blogosphere, is giving way to the terse trivia of Twitter and Facebook.

It was a lot easier to deal with deliberate trolls and spammers than it is to sort the interesting and insightful from of mountains of genuinely stupid nonsense.

Re:Social Spam

[Gizzmonic]

Not you, though! You're better than all those sad-sacks out there. You're DIFFERENT!

Re:Social Spam

[CrackedButter]

Delete the oral versions of said knife. Or do what I do and just accept facebook isn't a really cool place to socialise online with your friends just use it as a advertising tool. I recently left it, frustrated with the experience of communicating with my friends. Now I'll see them in real life, what they get online from me now on facebook is what I'm able to market as a photographer. Sad to say (but necessary), I don't care what they discuss unless they message me.

Re:Social Spam

[Tarsir]

I agree with the other reply to the parent. Normally I'm not a fan of 'obligatory' style posts, but it just fits too well. Get over yourself.

Re:Social Spam

[FreonTrip]

I got carried away - apologies, all.

Easy Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Delete your account. Or better yet, never make one in the first place.

I can understand the confusion!

[MrCrassic]

Not necessarily because of this:

It's fun enough, but I never really think of it as a service. To me, Facebook is a place.

In fact, I beg to differ. The whole entire purpose of Facebook (and its ilk) is to connect people with other people easily. While it might indeed be a place to see what's going on with one's friends or friends of friends, but that is a direct consequence of their mission. If that isn't a service, I don't know what is.

My reasons for confusion are the following:

• Facebook Credit. What the hell? I understand that Facebook games are really taking off and all that, but this has been tried time and again with terrible results. Additionally, what would anyone possible want to "buy" on Facebook? Marketplace items (whose transactions are NOT managed by Facebook, but by the sellers using the platform)? More game stuff? I suppose that it would make it easy to give points that can be used in other games and stuff like that.
• docs.com. Wasn't Microsoft releasing their online Office with Office 2010? If so, how is this any different? Is it the same?

The whole Pandora-Facebook tie-in is pretty natural; I really like the idea. All in all, though, I think they're trying to get a leg-up on Google, which would be nothing new.

Re:I can understand the confusion!

[Fnkmaster]

My understanding is that the several large Facebook game companies are making a lot of money off of micropayments for virtual goods.

See, for example: this article and more recently this one.

It clearly is working for Zynga to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And yes, I think it's stupid, but that doesn't mean people don't shell out money for it.

Login to find more privacy issues

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always nice to log in once a week and be forced to uncheck even more privacy leaking garbage.

Facebook is the bane of privacy minded people that want to stay connected (not necessarily in touch) with old friends, and, like MySpace has already felt, it is in for a rude awakening.

New API a faster way to get sued?

[eagl]

Didn't the last guy who pulled data from Facebook get threatened with a frivolous lawsuit with a nebulous charge of "terms of use" infringement? Who in their right mind is going to use a new and improved API, when in reality anyone pulling data from Facebook is risking crossing a vaguely defined line on what Facebook likes and what they'll sue over?

I have a family to feed and no money for even threatened lawsuits... I don't even know if my "normal" facebook use is legal since the whole point of social network is data mining for personal gain, and that guy was sued for nothing except doing it too well. If he had used the new API, he would just get sued faster.

Like on Facebook ?

[frenchbedroom]

I can't wait for the French-translated buttons : J'aime sur fesse bouc

And for Valley Girls : "Like on, like Facebook, like."

If

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't close your facebook account months ago you are a sad, sad person.

Exactly

[AnonymousClown]

Thank you. I couldn't have said it better myself.

An even more involved Facebook?

[Glarimore]

Sounds like a pain in my side. Personally, I've been growing pretty tired of every single website and application (or "service's") being increasingly willing to push integration with other websites and 3rd parties. I was angry when games and things started popping up on Facebook (that was why I left MySpace -- too much BS, not enough networking). I've been getting even angrier lately with the recent increase in the amount of spam messages sent and other maliscious activity. And I expect that when Facebook expands as a "service" there is only going to be more over the top bullcrap (games, dumb applications, evenmore notifications, etc.) and it's only going to get easier for maliscious websites to use Facebook to send spam messages, install malware, and steal information from users. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm ready to jump ship to a non-invasive, professional, networking website that supports things like pictures and events, but does so without all the fluff and the built-in messenger. Facebook, you were so cool.... but now you just suck.

Facebook is really a "casual gaming" site.

[Animats]

Facebook does a good job of being a "social network" for keeping up with your real-world friends. But if that's all you use it for, Facebook doesn't make any money. It's all that "casual gaming" and "fanning" that brings in the revenue. Connecting up with a game or becoming a "fan" of some commercial content sucks all your private data into some game operator's system.

Google conquered a similar problem. Organic search makes Google no money. Google's business is being an ad agency.

Locked In

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the multitude of privacy problems with all this new stuff, I would like it they at least made simple older features like the RSS feed from my group's wall to work.

a grumpy old 30-year old man

[wiredog]

Maybe it's because I'm 45, but I've always logged out of FB when I leave the site.

Beacon 2.0

[lyinhart]

This sounds like Beacon 2.0. But this time Facebook is putting a new slant on the tracking technology, via the seemingly harmless "Like" button and under the guise of making the web "more social."

From the WaPo

[wiredog]

Faster Forward

It's not going too far to say that Facebook ultimately wants to build a layer of identity and authentication on top of the entire Web. That may be helpful in some cases; for instance, I'd like to know which Yelp reviews come from the people I know and trust at Facebook. But I don't need it at every site, and you probably don't either.

how to define friendship:

[circletimessquare]

someone you actually spend time with

anyone you only share stuff on the internet with: they are just an acquaintance, not a friend

and if you insist that such acquaintances really ARE your friends, then you are a shallow person who has no real true friends, whether you realize it or not

lose facebook and gain real friends and real depth of character. or continue with the empty mask and the fake charade and the pointless surface level chatter and call that a "life". your choice

Re:how to define friendship:

[Anonymous Coward]

someone you actually spend time with

anyone you only share stuff on the internet with: they are just an acquaintance, not a friend

Oh, absolutes. I have plenty of friends that I only share stuff with on the internet. On the rare occasions when I travel 3000 miles to where they all live, then we spend time together. I guess we're only friends sometimes. Time to say goodbye to them, per your "definition of friendship."

He doesn't get it?

[dave562]

There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that.

It seems pretty obvious to me. Facebook is making it easier to data mine user information. The blogger who wrote the comment might not see a use for it, but I assure you that Zygna, the three letter agencies, and a whole slew of other organizations get all warm and fuzzy every time Facebook makes it easier to fetch data from the service.

Keep in mind, Facebook is getting ready for an IPO (no matter what Mark says). 90% of everything they do from here on out will be focused on making their offering more attractive to investors, marketers and the like.

The amount of data that is available through services that aren't Facebook is mind boggling. I work for a non-profit and some of the information being offered to us in the guise of "donor research" makes me uncomfortable. I don't like telemarketing. I don't like being approached by people who seem to know more about me than I'd ever volunteer on my own.

I hadn't even heard about "PRIZM" until a week or so ago.

http://en-us.nielsen.com/tab/product_families/nielsen_claritas/prizm

It seems to me that at the end of the day it comes down to consumerism. If a person feels comfortable with being marketed to, and enjoys consumerism and spending money and being up to date with information about new products, then that person won't really care if Facebook or anyone else makes it easy to market to them. On the other hand if a person enjoys a modicium of privacy and does not particularly enjoy being classified and analyzed and pigeon-holed by people they've never met, then the activities of sites like Facebook upset them.

Personally, I don't care too much. About a decade ago I read a book titled "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". It was written by a professor at the University of Arizona and is a great guide that covers the methodolies used by marketers, salespeople, and so on. Once the mind becomes aware of the underlying mechanisms by which decisions are influenced, it becomes fairly simple to automatically avoid attempts at manipulation.

FB Marketing Platform

[ebombme]

It seems that FB is really trying to find out everything that you 'Like' so that their marketing platform will be complete for their 'platform' charge into an advertising marketing. They will have an established network of sites that report back to FB what you like, and be able to sell that data to other ad services, or provide their own advertising service to each site in their network. Not only do they know what you are doing everyday (thanks to you), but every time you click that little 'Like' button you are selling a little piece of your soul for the (artist formerly known as the all-)mighty dollar. The sad fact isn't that people are giving away their souls for free, but that they are giving their soul away for free and couldn't care less about it. Apathy to data mining is a huge privacy issue in the world over. Honestly, how do we make people care enough to take some sort of action? But more importantly what action can you take? I would say one way would be to contribute to the EFF, but what else is there really?

Ouch

[The Angry Mick]

how many(of active) profiles have a friend list under 20 friends? I would suppose not a lot, I would even go as far as saying probably very rare.

You wound me, dude. You wound me to the core.

I proudly deleted my FB account a week ago!

[Hurricane78]

I have no problem openly saying to anyone using FB that he is a pathetic loser who likes to get raped in the (privacy-)ass hard and deep.
Because it’s not an opinion, but a straight out fact. You can hate the messenger for your own failure of having the balls for just saying no. But that won’t make in untrue.

Especially geeks. Using FB automatically voids your geek card.
Luckily, from my experience, most people here hate FB anyway. But you got to take a stand. You’re the expert. You should have the dominant reality for these things. They should follow you for guidance on IT topics. Not the other way around. Or else, are you really a expert at all?
(I think you are, you just don’t allow yourself to dominate. Typical geek problem.)

Info On Pandora

[pgn674]

Today, I was listening to Pandora, and noticed they offered to connect to my Facebook account. I said fine, then later on, noticed that below the player, Pandora was telling me that one of my coworkers liked the same song that I did. I hadn't known that about him, and at the time, it was relevant and interesting information, as I was listening to the song. Pandora has not posted anything to my or anyone else's Facebook wall yet.