Facebook and me

Hello, dear readers.

I know I've been gone for a while. My next post was supposed to be a zippy little essay about the deeper issues underlying the Mac vs. Windows debate that so monotonously abounds on the tech news websites. That's still a work in progress, and I fully intend to give the world the unvarnished glories of my thoughts on this subject in the near future.

But since I also want this blog to be more timely, I'm going to interrupt your regularly scheduled programing with a brief announcement about Facebook — or, as I now think of it, my Datamining page.

In recent weeks, Facebook has become more much more aggressive about adding "features" that are really just sweeping attempts to collect users into ready-made groups for advertisers. I don't have the time to go into details here, but you can read a pretty good summation — and an approximation of my feelings on the subject — here.

The last straw came this morning as I was logging onto my FB/DM page. Before I could get past the first page, I was confronted with a box that "asked" me to link all of the interests in my profile to their appropriate web pages: education, music, books, and that sort of thing. For example, it asked me to link to pages for both of my colleges as well as my high school. I didn't want to deal with this issue right at that moment, so I looked for a "cancel" or "ask me later" button.

Instead, I was given the choice "choose all" or "choose individually." I opted for the individual choice, thinking the option to put it off or, even better, not do it at all, could be found there. It wasn't. Instead, I only had the option to deselect all of the pre-checked boxes that corresponded to each of my listed interested. I did that, and told it "ok."

Facebook responded with the news that this would result in all of my unchecked interests being removed from my page. Apparently, in order to show you like something in Facebook-land, you now have to link to the official site. True to their word, the only interest I have on display now is for the band Rush — because it and The Beatles were the only sites I had cared enough in the past to link to. Why The Fab Four didn't make the cut, I don't know.

I may chat about the deeper ramifications of this in a future post; in the meantime, I just want to pass on that this little exercise in totalitarianism will result in my withdrawing from Facebook as much as possible. I intend to use it as a way to communicate with friends, and little else. From now on, what I like is none of Facebook's business.

The good news is that I intend to keep posting items here, and even plan to refer some of my friends from Facebook to this site. I may even shift some of my regular updates over to my long-neglected Twitter feed. Maybe it's making a tempest from a tea pot. But at the moment, I think that Facebook is looking at their users only as a commodity that they can deliver to their advertisers. And with all the myriad communications tools at our disposal today, I assure you that they need us far more than we need them.