Social Networks Share Information Without Permission

Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers (arstechnica.com)
Facebook, MySpace, others, sharing personal information w/o permission (wsj.com)
Major social networks (yes, Facebook) sending data about you to advertisers (mashable.com)

Are people actually surprised when shit like this happens? What could make you possibly think that the valuable information that you gave to these companies (facebook, myspace, etc) would not be used by them for profit? No matter what a company says in their policies or EULA or whatever the present you with before taking your personal information, these companies will use your information for profit if they find that the reward is larger than the risk. Either they lie to you and do it behind your back (greater risk) or they simply say "fuck you" and change the terms that you both agreed on (if there was ever any actual agreement. This could simply have been a statement on their website, in which case it's not exactly binding) and share it anyway.

In short, if you can't stand loosing your personal information, don't give it to somebody else!

Browser Wars

Another casualty.
I use Netscape 7.2 as my browser. It's great, it's fast, it's got a wonderful email client, and it uses an old gecko rendering engine (the same that was in firefox circa 2004) that does virtually anything you ask of it.
I say virtually, because one application (that I don't particularly like) has fallen off the wagon and now prohibits me from clicking buttons.
This application is facebook.com.
Whenever I go to respond to a message or accepting a friend request anything that involves any kind of submission, it just does not play ball. It doesn't give me an error message either, so I can't know it has actually failed. It just sits there as if the action I just took was lost somewhere between my mouse and my browser.
It used to work well up until a couple of weeks ago. Did my rendering engine deteriorate all of a sudden, or are the writers of facebook total asshats that will change a working solution to a non-working one without adding any other benefits?
I would have been more willing to accept it if they had some explanation like "as part of an upgrade, clicking a button will not dispense candy from your cd-rom drive, but as a result clicking buttons in Netscape 7.2 will not work".
I would have even settled for something less extravagant, but they have given me nothing, and yet taken a core feature away from me.
Now, I really hate to have an account on that glorified address book, but since "everybody is doing it", I figure I have to throw mine in with the rest.
At least until now.

From now on, please, those of you who read this. Don't contact me on facebook. I don't want to have to fire up another browser just to answer some message that could be sent to me via a plethora of other services (email being one).
People who don't have any other means of contacting me than via facebook, fine, you do that, but the rest of you. Please choose another proven means of communication where I don't have to suffer needlessly.
I would change browsers, if it wasn't for the fact that they all suck. I guess Opera is ok, but it still can't stand up to the awesome performance my Netscape 7.2.

Also, for hitherto unknown reasons, I get a "500 internal Server Error" when I try to use the blogger spell check.

Social Networking Revisited

It turns out that I wasn't the only person thinking about centralizing social networking.
Actually, my idea was to have a standardized format so that data could be moved easily, but this guy is proposing meshing the whole thing, and having a centralized login. Some interesting discussion. After my last article on social networking, a friend of mine told me that he had had just such an idea (centralizing social networking) before.

Web 2.0

I was watching click on BBC just now, and they were highlighting some new companies, and talking about venture capital, who it normally goes to, and why. They were talking about "clean tech", which apparently is an umbrella concept for all environmentally friendly technology, and how a third of all the VC money ends up in the hands of peope working with "clean tech".

When they weren't talking about clean tech, they were talking about the often espoused buzzword Web 2.0. They looked at services like twitter, some webbased movie editor, and some other completely useless Web 2.0 applications. As I was watching the report unfold, it dawned on me that very few of the Web 2.0 applications I have seen in recent memory has contributed with any added value, other than being a complete waste of time. Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about user contribution. Social networking sites and wiki-based applications litter the internet. Hell, I'm using a Web 2.0 application right now. To be fair, the only Web 2.0 applications that come to mind as useful are the various blogging platforms, wikipedia (to some extent), and the google maps system. I'd be hard pressed to find any other Web 2.0 applications I consider worthwhile.

Now, not finding a certain technology useful isn't really a problem. There is a lot of technology out there to fill your every need, but the scary thing is that the entire world has put its trust in Web 2.0, and a lot of money has been invested into it, which leads me to believe that we are heading for a similar crash like the one we had in the end of the 90ies, when the so-called "dot com bubble" burst. I'm not too well versed in the stock market, but I can't possibly imagine a lot of these investments panning out. If the Web 2.0 investors do well, so much better for them, but in all honesty, I doubt that they will. If they do, the users of the internet are worse off because the applications these venture capitalists put money into are taking up out time without rewarding us with anything worth while. All things considered, Web 2.0 is largely a loose-loose situation for civilization (if I'm allowed to use such a grand and all-encompassing term), and I think that people should think twice with redards to both what they invest their money in, and how they spend their valuable time.

On a different note, sitting at a different computer, I have noticed that sometimes this site provided popups. This was never my intention, and I will try to get to the bottom of this and banish those accursed things from this site forever.
(Yet again the spell checker fails me...)

EDITED TO ADD: Ok, so I guess youtube also makes the list of acceptable Web 2.0 applications, but I am already royally pissed at the facebook apps system, and I've been a member for less than a month.

On Social Networking

I was looking at my brother's Facebook profile, and I was overwhelmed at how filled-in it was.
He had a vast network of friends who were all on Facebook, he had some "apps" running, and a tonne of pictures.
Now, I could very well hook in to that, since about half of his friends are my friends as well, but I don't know if I have the energy to fully invest myself in yet another social networking site.
Granted, I don't hang out on many, and I'm still not sure that social networking isn't anything more than a time sink, but it's not like I (currently) have very much else to do.
The problem, of course, is that the amount of other stuff I have to do varies, while the need to keep your social networking profile going stays the same. There are various solutions to this, but regardless of which one you pick, something has to get put on the back burner. Either the social networking site(s), or something else in your life.

Yet another problem is that if I decide complete my profile, and spend hours and hours on Facebook, feeling important, what happens if Facebook either calls it quits, or something else pops up that is "all the rage", and people just migrate? I know that competition is healthy in a marketplace, and in most cases the consumers benefit from it.
Here, on the other hand, competition kills the user. Since no one is paying for any of these services, the biggest advantage of competition is lost, namely that prices go down if multiple vendors offer the same merchandise. Also, since all the data is proprietary, moving from one social networking site to another requires the user to put in all the time again to fill the profile of the new service, and keep it plied with photos and witty remarks.

Even though it is not in the best interest of the social networking sites, in fact it could quite possibly be devastating to some, it would be nice if they offered all your information in some portable format. That way, when something new comes along, you can just export your profile from one service, and import it to another. The advantages here for the users should be apparent:

• The users only need to enter their data once.
• The users get the best from the developers of the social networking site, since they know that proprietary data tie-in is no longer a possibility, they must fight for the users, constantly adding new features and besting their rivals.

Another nice though would be interoperability between social networking sites, but that's as likely to happen as hell dropping below zero.

If we look at this from a slightly different perspective, we can throw most of what I just said out of the window. The thing with these social networking sites is that, while they enable people to connect in ways never though possible, they provide the user with something to do.
Much like TV, keeping an active profile on a social networking site is an opium for the masses. If it was easy and required no time, people wouldn't do it. At least not more than once.

It's basically all about group mentality. Someone does something that is perceived as cool, and everybody else wants to jump on the bandwagon. Nowadays, if your profile isn't as filled as the profiles of the people around you, you are considered to be less of a person, because you obviously have fewer friends.

Social networking sites can be fun, and they are surely a time sink. If they are good or bad or just plain frivolous remains to be seen. I think that the more time you put in to them, the more you are likely to get out of them (as with most things in life), but I also think that there is a threshold you mustn't cross, when the time spent updating your profile takes over more important tasks like getting work done. (To the adults in the audience who expected "more important tasks like spending time with your friends", I say this: you are living in an outdated society. This is spending time with your friends, and the sooner adults and parents see that, the sooner kids all around the world will be better off. I have met some of my best friends via various Internet communication services.)

I wanted to close with something about using social networking services with moderation, but then the words of Hunter S. Thompson struck me, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right".

I guess you have to ask yourself, are social networking sites worth doing?

I really should re-read these things and pick out the core theme and write a proper article, like a real writer, but right now I can't be bothered.

Facebook

So, I guess I'm on Facebook now. I figured, since I had already gotten 3 invitations, they had my email address already. I hear Facebook is all the rage, so I might as well check it out for myself.
They do request a lot of information about you when you set up your profile. Thus far I've only entered my blog address. They ask me about my sexual orientation, my political views, my religious views, who I'm dating and a sea of other very private stuff.
Now, I don't mind sharing these things with anybody, but I do know that in the hands of the wrong people, a database like Facebook is a marketing (and pseudo-anti-terrorism) gold mine.
I mean, anybody could perfectly tailor their message based on this information, and creating a no-fly list is a snap, just sort people based on religion (I wish I was kidding about this, but I fear that I'm not).
At least this information isn't required. The thing with privacy isn't so much what your beliefs and values are, but that you choose who to display them to, and under what circumstances. Bruce Schneier wrote a piece not long ago about data re-use, and it highlights some of my fears with systems like this. Sure, most people "promise" to not use the data for anything like that, but it does end up being used for other things every now and then. Hopefully not as often as my paranoid mind fears though.