Facebook is absolutely massive. If you don’t have an account with them, I’d currently recommend that you stay away. If you have an account, my advice at this point is that while it may not be worth removing your account, it is certainly worth limiting your exposure to the service.
Yes, I said exposure, as though it were some sort of bacterial infection. There’s a bunch of information on the Internet; the one that caught my eye in a big way was Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook. The EFF also has a number of great articles related to Facebook on its Deeplink Blogs related to Social Networks. I highly encourage everyone visiting this page to dive deeper into these articles, and for those that come in the future.
Look, but don’t touch
My advice to those who aren’t already in Facebook is that it’s best to stay away. You’ve done alright by this point without it, and there are enough snags that it’s worth keeping away.
For those already in the system, I’m not sure that deleting your account makes all that much sense. In many ways there is a lot of concrete value in having a Facebook account, connected to your friends and family.
With that said, I do think it’s best to not put any more information into the system, and to remove what Likes you have left. Think of Facebook more as a read-only system, not as read-write.
Alternatives
In truth, there are countless reasonable alternatives to each of Facebook’s features, and you can rather easily find the same value outside. This may be the time to start a blog, a website, a Twitter feed, a flickr or Picasa account; or, sans all that, to just go back to email as a primary mode of communication.
There are countless other options where you can get out what you put in, without the same threats of privacy or lock-in. Don’t click on any of the Facebook ads, and if there are people whose content you really like, softly encourage them to put their efforts somewhere else.
I’m not particularly pushing Google, though their Data Liberation Front is a wonderful initiative which puts the power back towards the user. WordPress, additionally, makes it easy to export all your content in a couple of clicks. Twitter has an option of protecting your content from anyone beyond the list of those who you accept.
Final thoughts
In the end, I think the solution is by a number of small movements. With my Facebook account, I may still “Like” someone’s status from time to time, though I’m done with Community Pages or Pages. I’m no longer letting Facebook import my data from Netflix or Twitter. I’m no longer going to use its messaging, instant messaging, status updates, notes, wall posts, etc. It’s up to you to decide where you want to go with all of these decisions, though I certainly do recommend less over time rather than more, in terms of any kinds of Facebook interactions.
I totally agree with you . . I’m one of those people who took forever to convince to get a MySpace account for similar privacy based reasons, along with the hassle of it. The problem is I now feel stuck on facebook, in that if I were to delete my account then I would loose a form of almost daily interaction I now have with my family (I don’t go on there every day but I can log in to see what my sister is up to any time I want because she posts every day). I miss e-mails for sure. What about responding to people’s comments? Do you think you should not interact with the site at all?
Responding to comments seems safe, for now. Especially a “Like” or a quick sentence or two won’t do anything major. I figure that if you have something more substantial to say than that, though, it’s worth moving that conversation into an email.
It’s hard to say where it’s going, but the trend they seem to want is that if you have a status update that you went to Wal-Mart, that’ll eventually automatically imply that you’re a Fan of Wal-Mart; or, in the new lingo, that you “Like” the “Community Page” associated with Wal-Mart. That, to me, seems a bit creepy, and again tends towards making public what otherwise would be private information. Now, for Wal-Mart, that would be valuable information; and since Facebook does eventually have to pay for its servers, staff, etc., that is my guess as to how the general pattern/motivation will go.
I think the growing pains FB is experiencing are the geek population’s rebellion against the monetization of the non-retail side of the net. Web advertising doesn’t seem to be paying the bills for most companies whose name doesn’t end in -oogle. The big money is in brand advertising, and brand advertising still mostly occurs on TV. FB ads have horrible conversion rates for the little guys, and the content hosts are having serious trouble attracting the big names. Can you imagine Coke spending Superbowl money on an Internet-only campaign?
I think we’re going to see some content split away behind paywalls, like Murdoch’s trying to do, and other providers are going to focus on hyper-identifying their customers and selling that info away. If FB, which has more data on its users than almost anyone, can prove to Walmart that they can bring more eyes from the right demographics to its site, then Walmart’s going to go to FB in a big way.
Ad-displaying webpages have to come up with ways to avoid adblocking software and conscious and unconcious user habits that we’ve all developer to make us pretty much blind to online advertising. I block those side ads on my PC, and my eyes skip right over them on my phone.
Put it this way–let’s say a publisher buys ads for a new book in the traditional adspace on FB. How many of us are ever going to even notice the ad, let alone click on it or buy the book? But let’s say the publishers and Amazon both pay Facebook so that anytime a user mentions that book by name, it gets linked to the book’s Amazon page? Now they can leverage the existing positive word of mouth that the user’s mention would have given you into a much more likely impulse sale. It’s a win for the publisher, Amazon, and FB.
If Twitter’s smart they’ll end up in the same place.
The eventual bottom line for me is that everything has to be paid for somehow. There are a lot of things I’ll pay for as far as computing goes (although there are fewer of them now that I’ve been on Arch for a year), but news, networking, and communication aren’t on the list. For those companies to stay in business, or for new businesses to enter the market, there has to be a profitable end game that doesn’t simply rely on unsustainable growth and funding.
I definitely agree that monetization is a problem. The trouble is that Facebook is heading towards models that are good for them, without giving much thought or care to the users. Fundamentally, it’s their lack of disclosure which is disheartening. Having a button which says nothing towards privacy when it’s really just a “yes, make everything public” switch is rather insane.
I like what you’re saying about the Amazon plan. It’s essentially an easier opt-in to their affiliate programs. At current, that step requires registering with them; and it also benefits the user, since sales that are generated lend part of that revenue to the user who initiated the link. In your proposal, however, that money goes to Facebook, not to the user who’s generating the content. That’s a good position if you’re Facebook; but as a user, there’s literally no value to it. Maybe that can get spread three ways, but I don’t imagine that’ll be the case.
With that said, lowering the barrier of entry into such sort of affiliate programs could be a great thing, and I do think part of the future lies in that. I don’t think the systems are in place well enough for that quite yet, but who knows.
There’s a lot of start-up money and speculation that goes into a lot of web sites/companies, and it’ll be interesting to see what effect that has on the future of the web. I do think paywalls are going to be more common; but only alongside smaller payments. Smaller payments probably are heading towards lower transaction costs, which might inject more competition into credit card companies from companies like eBay. I’m very interested in where it’ll all turn out.
Thanks for the comment, this is great!