The tofu is calling my name

Facebook
A couple of interesting links: Day without Facebook
Facebook made Time!
Using the outcry for Aids research.

My thoughts on this whole facebook thing:
I'm going to lay low on facebook for a while. I'm going to try not to have actions show up in my mini feed, really.

The whole issue here is privacy. Facebook claims there is no information now that wasn't available before - ok, sure. But what is really going on is the information is a lot more digestable, and easily obtained. Sure, I put in my information voluntarily and don't really do anything that I'd care if other people knew about. Here's the difference: Before, if I wrote on someone's wall, you pretty much had to know that person as well, and be checking their profile, to see if I wrote something there. People aren't going to go through all of my friends to see what my most recent activity was, where I posted and whatnot. Now, they don't have to do that, that information is readily available to them. (I'm not sure, but your feed may only show you wall notes for people you know both the person writing and recieving the note).

Here's another scenario: One of your friends tags a picture of you making a fool of yourself the night before. Before, you'd get an email notice of it and only people checking your friend or your profile will have any idea that that picture even exists. Now, lets say that picture gets posted early in the morning, and you have class all day - with the NewsFeed, hundreds of people could be notified about the existence of that picture before you even know it has been placed on facebook. That brings up another issue - with photos, you should APPROVE tags, not be asked to remove them, for the same reason. Unless you actually talk to the person who put the photo up, you still can't say whether the photo goes up or not - but having your name tagged should be something you approve, not something you remove.

I think the big issue is that people might actually enjoy the feature - if they'd been GIVEN the option. As it is, I would probably turn both off - I really don't care to know the feed for all 300 of my friends; And I do actually KNOW all of those people and can generally tell you HOW I know them, without needing to note it on facebook. The idea is, the people I know and care about, I'm going to seek out their information, and as its currently set up I might not even get that information amongst all the clutter from the people who are on facebook all the time. If you could select WHICH of your friends you get feeds from, that might be a really interesting feature.

Someone mentioned that as its a free service, people shouldn't complain about it. I'd like to comment that the people running facebook are making a decent chunk of change off this free service, and by keeping it free they probably make more money. They wouldn't have the product they have today if people didn't have some input - and I'd say people can whine away in an attempt to get it changed, at least for a limited amount of time. If you really don't like it, quit whining and deactivate from facebook. I'm considering it, really, or at least removing most of my information. Its really amazing how few events I'd find out about if I didn't have facebook.

We talked about privacy in the social seminar group today, after reading a paper by Yvette Rogers on Ubiquitous Computing. The basic discussion revolved around designing for privacy - basically, if you don't consider privacy in some of the early stages of design, it tends to be less secure and more prone to errors if its added in as an afterthought. Designers should consider if they are going to record information or not, and what to do with that information if they do record it.

I had a second rant, on something non facebook related, but as of now I dont remember. I want to be an expert at something.