The Great Wall of Facebook
wired.com
wired.com
Facebook has never shown itself to be trustworthy. They continually try and control their users data. They made it extremely difficult to delete an account before. Most of their ad providers seems sleazy and trying to trick you. Their stupid 3rd party apps get who knows how much access to your profile, completely unregulated by Facebook. Not to mention them secretly changing terms of service and the like.
I feel comfortable with Google. I never feel comfortable with Facebook.
That's an interesting point. How you ever tried to delete your search history at Google? One of the main differences between the two that I see is that everything Facebook knows about you, you have to explicitly tell it. Google quietly logs everything you search for and you don't even notice.
However, does the fact that a cosmetic delete function exists say that Google wants to allow you to actually delete something or just wants you to think that you are deleting something, and is this better or worse than Facebook, which doesn't even have a cosmetic interface to do so, other than perhaps removing your account all together, and has established and known TOS that say they can do whatever they want with the data you give them?
When I delete my account, any files (photos) I have uploaded are deleted. I don't care if I tagged someone in another photo which I didn't upload, it's their name there, not mine. If a message I sent is in someone's inbox, I obviously don't have any control (actually it depends, but let's take it this way).
It's like if I deleted my email account, I expect my inbox to be deleted, not an email I sent, which is in someone elses inbox.
In that sense they quietly log things that you may not even notice. Facebook can know a lot more about you than just what you explicitly write in your profile.
That said, I'm significantly less comfortable with Facebook.
People used it for all kinds of things - political news pieces for likeminded friends, some spouses shared raunchy things, some dude even made it part of his business.
One day Google decided that all of your friends should be able to see your shared items. And that your friends are everyone you've ever sent email to from your gmail account. This caused a bit of anguish for a fair few people - family rifts, job issues, etc...
The official workaround was to either unshare the items or delete people from your contacts list. Sometime after that they added the ability to not have everyone you've every contacted be your friend, and now I believe there's an option to opt-in to the feature and then select who gets to see it.
No trace of an apology to anyone, and the thread of angry people in the reader google group basically got admonished for believing that the pseudorandom looking URL that only the user had access to in anyway implied that the data was private. If the shared page was www.google.com/readers/[username] that'd be fair enough I guess.
For some people it was as big a deal as making everyones email readable by any and all, and there wasn't any kind of official response that acknowledged it was a misstep, let alone apologizing.
I figured since it was around a month after the Beacon fiasco at Facebook that they'd decided that an apology would get them bad PR and so they just ignored the upset people. I switched to Bloglines, and I imagine quite a few of the people who were effected by or noticed what happened did as well.
pd1. I can post the mails if you want. pd2. These are not the standard direct invitations that I also receive from them via some friend of me.
While at one point AOL was powerful and rich enough to purchase Time Warner. AOL still hangs on, a shell of what it once was. The main difference, is that AOL had a clear monetization strategy: it charged its users for access. And, it made craploads of money because it simplified computers and getting online for millions of people.
Facebook does a similar thing. It allows people to do interesting things with their computers without having to worry about the dark and scary bits of the internet.
Us older people remember the devastation that occured when AOL unlocked the gate it's walled garden to let people access the internet at large. It's know as the eternal September. Finally, when AOL's users got tech savvy enough to use the wild internet without AOL's hand holding, they left in droves.
I suspect similar things are going to happen to Facebook users. I could be wrong.
While it is interesting to learn new tidbits of information about them, I am also very aware of the fact that, for instance, none of them live in Mountain View. If I decided I wanted to move there, the first thing I would do is turn to Google to learn about real-estate, utilities, getting a driver's license, etc. I don't quite see how placing the constraints of a social graph on top of a search for unknown information will make that search more useful. When stepping into uncharted territory, I don't want artificial limitations on what I find.
For example, my high school friends probably hate my updates about programming and computer topics. And honestly I don't care much about their trip to the river.
On the other hand, my more professional friends (who I don't interact with on twitter) could care less that I'm walking the dog but are happy to chat about programming.
For that reason I have multiple communities: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN. They each have different social graphs and I discuss different things with each of them. Facebook's is trying to connect to these other sites to connect usernames to Facebook profiles, but I'm not sure I want all that going back to the same place.
"Phase 1. Harvard only.
Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.
Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.
Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).
Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.
Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.
Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."
http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...
You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or Windows Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then you type "sushi near me."
It answers back "within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more than 20 of your friends have liked."
So far, there hasn't been a single social app I tried that managed to give me useful information like that. Why? Because they don't offer me a good way to differentiate and they don't learn. For these apps, all contacts in my network are the same and there's no way to teach them otherwise. On Facebook, I'm "friends" with:
1) People I see daily at work and we're friendly to each other.
2) People I've met in the past few years and we've been friendly back then but now were out of touch.
3) People from my ground school and high school, whom I haven't seen in more than 20 years.
4) A few relatives.
5) A few people with whom I have a lasting friendship.
Depending on what kind of "friend" my contact is, I would treat their recommendations of sushi restaurants differently. The same thing happens to me on the Goodreads site. I've found many great books there, but every time I had to search for hours.
I suppose it's just a matter of time before someone finally does it right, but I just wanted to point out what I find to be missing. And I'm really wondering whether other people feel the same or I'm just too damn picky...
Google has lots of information about past searches, browsing history, etc, but it lacks personal information such as the organization you are currently working for or your favorite TV shows and bands (or in the case of many of us, our favorite blogs and programming languages).
It would probably solve your problem if an option to "Only consider the opinion of these Groups" were present. Of course, we'll fall into the problem of how noteworthy their opinions are depending on the subject. While I would trust my middle brother expertise on digital cameras, the youngest in the house is a chef, so each one should weight differently.
Something so complete will never happen (never is a dangerous word), because that would require other people to constantly input information like "I trust Gustavo's opinion on digital cameras", and even that isn't enough, because my brother is a professional photographer, and isn't the best person to ask if you want a cheap camera.
So, I don't think any of these "other people you know liked XYZ" will manage to give you things that you'll probably like (I enjoy different types of japanese food than my brother, for example), but they will help you socialize more. You'll at least know that your friend went to some restaurant, and tell him later about your experience.
Yes, we’re having another baby. But look at what did NOT happen on Twitter: not a single diaper company contacted us yet. Not a single maternity clothing company. Not a single car company (yes, we’re going to buy a new one soon). Not a single camera company (already bought a new one for this occassion). Not a single insurance company (I need more). Not a single bank (I need to start saving for another college student). Not a single stroller company (need a new one that can hold two). Not a single vitamin company (Maryam is going through her prenatal vitamins at a good clip). Not a single shoe company (Maryam needs new shoes for pregnancy, and Milan is growing fast too).
That will NOT last.
they(Google) don't think Facebook's staff has the brainpower to succeed where they have failed. "If they found a way to monetize all of a sudden, sure, that would be a problem," says one highly placed Google executive. "But they're not going to."
This is the same kind of Arrogant and cocky attitude which made IBM irrelevant in PC market, Microsoft irrelevant in Online market and Maybe Google in Advertising. History repeats Itself every decade, atleast in Technology.
That argument makes no sense, especially in comparison to facebook. Google is a set of disconnected services that you can take or leave. You don't like google search or gmail or google maps or google news? Go ahead and use something else. For any service that doesn't require immediate personalization, you don't even need to sign up ever. Even if every single person you interact with uses google search or gmail, it doesn't matter because you have no obligation to use it. As a developer, if you hate google and don't want to use anything by the company all you have to think about is SEO, most of which is basically common sense and regular marketing on non-google sites. Why would you possibly even need to consider "fight[ing] against" google unless you were directly competing?
In contrast, Facebook explicitly wants to be THE monolithic dominating force on the internet. You can't even use it without signing up and joining the whole Facebook thing. If everyone you know is using it, you end up missing out; it's basically vendor lock-in for your entire social life. And as a developer, interacting with Facebook in any meaningful way means dealing with Facebook every step of the way.
Monolithic platforms like Facebook are truly awful. Facebook is defined by locking people into the platform while Google joins together disparate web services and competes on quality and brand recognition. Google has its problems, but Facebook's problems are right at the core of everything it does.
It is the new AOL.
I'm still waiting for the "Internet" of social networking sites to come along and make Facebook, MySpace, etc. things of the proprietary past.
I'm sure that Facebook works on and solves some interesting problems, but to act like what they do is harder than what Google has accomplished? C'mon now.
I've yet to read an article about Facebook in which Zuckerberg doesn't come off like a jerk
Do you know, I think Opera might agree with you here. Except now they've started it, everyone's laughing at them.