I started off on Facebook as an alternative to Orkut, pretty impressed by its privacy settings. It was a slick web application, more so because it let you add applications of your own, and hence came along SuperPoke, Superlatives, SuperWall, Characteristics and what not.
Lately, there have been a lot of issues with Facebook I find ‘grey’, to say the least.
a) The fact that you HAVE to spam all your friends with requests to add an application, if you happen to add that application and want to see what it does. There are thousands that force you to send invites to your friends.
b) The fact that most people DO NOT know that their profile is available publically. Me and SEV have had a long discussion about this.Though the concept is indeed Social networking, there needs to be a mechanism to let users know that absolutely anyone can view their public profile, if they’ve not disabled it.
c) The fact that there is malware circulating on Facebook. This is seriously lip licking, from a Information Security point of view, but I’d seriously doubt the IT competence of most people to see through such an attack.
d) The utter pointlessness of some applications. I agree, its my choice about what application to add, but there are some which I seriously fail to comprehend the utility of. Yeah, I had added Pirates, Ninjas, Vampires, Werewolves and that entire pile of tripe :-), and then concluded this.
e) Of course, the fact that Facebook resizes your pics to some ultra crappy resolution is a well known fact. I’ll still prefer Picasa for pics anyday.
There are many other gripes too, but they are a personal opinion.
No, that does not mean I’m getting off Facebook, or getting rid of it, but these are issues that need to be addressed, for an otherwise classy Social Networking Application.
And for those of you with extreme privacy concerns, use discretion about how public you’re making your information. It is SOCIAL NETWORKING, for the sake of God, and there would be nothing social about it, if all your information was hidden, at one end of the spectrum, or all your information was available, at the other end. If you really are that concerned about privacy, you should be getting rid of your Facebook accounts. I for one, am not a least bit concerned about privacy online, if this is anything to go by. I’m careful about what I put online where.
2 Comments until now
Aargh… You said it was ok!
That pretty much sums up anything I would have to say
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