The Real Problem with Facebook's Timeline
remarkedly.com
remarkedly.com
I know how absurd that may sound, but Timeline, especially taken long-scale, could have a major impact on how we perceive our lives and ourselves because of how impossible it will be to escape from the past without painstakingly filtering and removing posts and pictures.
The obvious response, of course: "if you don't want permanence, don't upload in the first place." And this will be something I keep in mind, unless Facebook adds features to easily prune content from Timeline. But it's ridiculous that I should need to be that concerned about every pithy status I decide to post, not because of its contents in the present, but how they could be perceived in the future by myself and others.
Really? I work with kids and that's not really my experience. One of them told me what one of their friends posted on Twitter, which I won't repeat here, but shows that they really, really have no idea.
What you consider offensive or career limiting might be totally irrelevant in 10 years because anyone will be able to find anything someone ever said.
etc...
UPDATE posts SET visibility = CLOSE_FRIENDS WHERE ts < NOW() - 3600 * 24 * 365
DELETE FROM posts p WHERE COUNT(SELECT id FROM tags t WHERE t.post_id = p.post_id AND t.user_id = EX_GIRLFRIEND_ID)=1Personally, I love how easy the timeline makes it to jump back to my freshman year of college. I can see how much I've changed as a person for better or worse. It's like an excellent scrapbook of my life and I'm happy to have it.
FTFA: "And if you have been even partially active on Facebook for the past few years, there is simply way too much of it to possibly delete manually. There is no button to simply “delete all” (trust me, I’ve looked)."
Back when I decided to do over my Twitter profile, I used the API to automate the deletion of all my tweets. Any other way would be impossible.
But I don't see how "improving content discoverability" is suddenly a bad thing on Facebook? Yes, Timeline makes it easier to find old stuff, but on HN aren't we always looking for users to be able to access and discover content as easily as possible?
You could do it with the real API, but it could also probably be done with a few lines of Javascript pasted into the URL bar on your profile.
Any takers?
From the comments there, it sounds like the real API might limit you to deleting messages created by your own app. Somebody also posted a Javascript solution where you double-click the 'delete' button to delete all older posts, but I'm not sure if it will work since the version information says "obsolete" in it.
I love timeline. It is my life-log. I don't share everything publicly. I share it with Only Me/Close Friends/Family. All my old photologs are now migrated to facebook, with very limited Visibility.
Facebook photo management tools still suck. You could easily take a copy of your data from facebook (https://www.facebook.com/settings -> Download a copy of your data), but there is no easy way to delete them.
Perhaps the timeline will help overcome this tendency. By making everyone's history more visible, maybe people will become less sensitive to seeing past examples of immaturity and therefore weigh them less when making judgements about a person.
In the past, that ex-girlfriend or boss might have taken the time and effort to dig through content to find out about a drunken college night, but you would probably have completely forgotten it existed. Timeline offers you a way to double check old content comparatively quickly and easily.
If it wasn't for e-mails (gmail), I would had never re-connected with some people on Facebook. The interface is an ice breaker and a way to less awkwardly contact someone you haven't spoken to in years. Or quickly see how someone is doing.
Most of what I want is simple and fundamental. It doesn't require me giving a never-ending marketing survey on my interests. My desired service is connectivity with a simple interface that can largely exist off my e-mail contacts. I don't see why a $75 billion company is needed to do this.
The problem is that the things I want to be visible changes with time, so I can't just not post it in the first place, because what seems perfectly fine today may be really bad a few years from now, and I can't know that ahead of time. And there really is no way to delete everything as far as I know.
Why I think it's stupid is the damn layout. I used to be able to linearly scroll back to someone's recent history to check back what s/he said or posted. Now it's all sort of mixed up in a horrifically heavy layout that slows down tablets and less powered machines, and requires a large screen to be viewed properly.
I don't mind making inane posts on Facebook which friends can comment on as that post shows up in their newsfeed, but once enough time has passed for it to fall off the newsfeed then as far as I'm concerned it can be permanently deleted.
P.S. I've started referring to logical deletes as "Facebook deletes" in work.
Now it seems more of a PR stream, people staging photos for facebook, carefully updating status's knowing that a wider audience can see.
For me timeline represents facebooks focus on a single identity that you control, rather than representing who you actually are.
The problem is with Facebook's privacy controls and I think they have improved from the rock bottom that they had reached. Timeline will change our behavior on Facebook and that is something the News Feed also did. I don't see how that is necessarily bad.
- When some of my friends' Timelines open, it takes ages for it to load and then every other program I might have open on my laptop drags, if I leave that tab open - It is far more difficult to follow the "timeline" even for recent postings, that often you can miss interesting items - I can't hide or reduce to a select group, only delete postings
Which is why I haven't implemented and hate when I see it on other's profiles.
However, Timeline actually makes this a lot easier. I can click on 2008 and then see everything in 2008 and delete it all right from the timeline.
The reason I'm deleting it all is because Facebook asks for confirmation of "Delete this post?" for every single one. If I say yes, and they remove it from view, I have, as far as I'm concerned, both a moral and legal right to believe it is actually deleted from their database. Otherwise "delete this post?" would be a fraudulent offer.
Thus, if any information that I've deleted shows up in the future, I will have a claim against them. (Whether its practical to press that claim or not, I don't know. I just want them to be obligated to have deleted it because their software made the promise that they were.)
As someone who has never had a facebook account, though just about 99% of the people I know do, I am interested to see what this "shadow profile" of me looks like.
My wife and others have logged into FB from my machine, phone and ipad previously - thus I am sure that there were periods of time where my actions were tracked based on the install of their cookies.
I'd wonder what the legal basis would be of FB tracking those without accounts, based on the cookies of others.
Six months later, I still have no desire to go back.
Any complex system is going to have good parts and bad parts. Walking away because you don't like the bad would require you to abandon the good. An often more efficient alternative is to stay, continue to enjoy the good, and campaign to have the bad changed or removed.
One is a corporation whose purpose is to extract value in any means possible - even were it to the detriment of society and its members.
On the one hand, a single person’s ability to change government policy is pretty small. You can vote, call your member of Congress, or sign a petition. But it’s only true in a limited sense that the rules change if you ask.
On the other hand, a corporation’s “purpose” is to do what its owners ask it to do, not necessarily to maximize profit. (See Dodge v. Ford and its interpretation for caveats and nuances.) If Facebook’s shareholders vote for it to convert all its assets to glitter and distribute it evenly over the surface of the moon, that becomes its “purpose”. That won’t happen, just like it won’t happen that the people of the US vote for the US to do that, but in principle it could.
Facebook trades partly on its reputation. It has an incentive to not openly harm society and its members, because that would be bad PR and thus hurt its long-term profits.
Corporations and governments are different in important ways, and frankly I often wish they were more different, but I think it’s fair to compare them in this context.