james mckay dot net

My brother thought that my decision to quit Facebook was just me getting caught up in the hype about Quit Facebook Day. This wasn’t actually true: I’d been mulling it over for several months, and just looking for the right time to do so. I announced my intention as a status update on Facebook about nine days ago, and finally pulled the plug on my account on Sunday after I got home from church, a day earlier than I’d intended.

What happened in the end? The silence has been deafening. No-one commented, no-one e-mailed, no-one phoned me up, no-one tried to persuade me that I’d been reading too much Jeff Atwood, no-one questioned my decision. This is not what I expected at all. I’d expected a string of wall posts trying to talk me out of it, people asking me what had happened, discussing among themselves what I was doing, speculation about whether someone had offended me, or whatever. Perhaps a few specially sharpened Bible verses reminding me that Jesus commands us to love one another. Isn’t quitting Facebook tantamount to social suicide? For that reason, I decided merely to deactivate my account rather than delete it outright, so that if things did go that way, I could always return. But after nearly a week, they haven’t.

The only conclusions I could draw from this were that either (a) people don’t really care about me, or (b) people don’t really care about Facebook. The more people I speak to, the more I come to the conclusion that it’s the latter rather than the former. This kind of makes sense. While the majority of my friends have Facebook accounts, a large percentage of them don’t, and of those who do, many of them seem to make very little use of it. Some of them, I just never got round to linking up with on the site, but I’m still friends with them in Real Life.

All in all, I’m far from convinced that Facebook is the “must-have” that the press make it out to be. In fact, it’s probably more of a “nice to have.” We’re told that it has five hundred million “fans” — but if up to forty percent of these “fans” are fake accounts, created by spammers and virus writers to distribute malware, and over fifty percent of the remainder are only occasional users or even dormant accounts, it doesn’t sound quite so impressive.

I’m hoping that the Diaspora project lives up to its promises. It’s a tall order, but done right, a distributed social network, where you install the software and you manage your online relationships, rather than handing them over to commercial interests, could be quite promising. By being distributed in nature, you avoid the pitfalls of a centralised social network which would put you at risk by changing the rules of the game at a whim. If they make it GPL and put it on github, it would be a guarantee against them turning nasty, since if they did, other developers would be able to come along, fork it, and release a version of their own that you could trust. Of course, in order to compete against Facebook, they need to pull out all the stops in terms of usability. After all, if it’s to be successful in that respect, they will need to pitch it first and foremost to not-computer people.

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Posted at 08:00 on 4 June 2010.
Tagged: Diaspora, Facebook

Monday 31 May is Quit Facebook Day, and I have decided to do just that.

Over the past few months I’ve been getting more and more fed up with Facebook. I’ve been watching their approach to privacy and respect (or lack of it) for their users’ data with dismay, and it’s reached the point at which my distrust of the site has gone critical. Yes, they’re making noises that they’re going to simplify your privacy settings, but I am just not in the slightest bit convinced. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a case of making the minimum concessions they can get away with to get some good PR and keep various random governments off their backs, then start pushing it up again once the dust settles.

You know these applications that you get, telling you things like what Star Wars character you are, or your Myers-Briggs type? The ones where you have to add them to your profile just to see what your friend’s answer was? They aren’t built by Facebook themselves but by third parties, who, for all I know, could have their servers in some country where data protection laws are nonexistent and the Mafia run the government. And the amount of personal data that they can get their mitts on through the Facebook developer API is downright scary.

It’s been a complete bait-and-switch. When Facebook first started, its big selling point was that it was all private: unless you were friends with someone, you couldn’t see anything on their profiles except their list of friends, and in some cases not even that. Nowadays, you can click through to almost anyone you like on Facebook and you can see everything they’ve posted and everything that everyone else has posted about them, including those embarrassing photos of them at a party several years ago. Complete strangers. I find that creepy.

I have of course locked down my account as far as I can, but I don’t even trust them with that any more—and of course, even with their new “simplified” privacy settings, there are still things that they force you to make public. That’s why, a couple of weeks ago, I deleted almost everything from my Facebook profile and left every group that I was a member of. I stopped short of unfriending everybody: that’s the last step I’ll take before actually closing my account.

For those of you who want to keep in touch with me, I will still be online, just in different places: e-mail, my blog, LinkedIn, and for the geeks among you, github and Stack Overflow. I’m also going to start using Twitter again: I closed down my Twitter account a couple of months back for different reasons that I won’t go into here, but I recently re-opened it, and I’ll probably start making a bit more use of it. I don’t have the same objections to Twitter as I do to Facebook: it may be public but it doesn’t pretend to be otherwise, and it’s nice and simple, only demanding a bare minimum amount of personal information. I’m not sure quite how much I’ll use it in the end, and I can’t guarantee that it won’t be a complete geek-out, but if you think you’ll miss me from Facebook, it’s there as an alternative.

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Posted at 08:00 on 27 May 2010.
Tagged: Facebook

So I finally succumbed to pressure from my friends and colleagues and got myself onto Facebook. This may come as a bit of a surprise given my rather low opinion of MySpace, but then again, while there are similarities, Facebook is not MySpace.

What is the difference? Two things. One is aesthetics. There are none of these awful seizure-inducing profile pages with illegibly tiny pink text on an orange background, and no annoying background music, and in their place is a slick, clean, responsive, easy to use Ajax driven interface.

The second — and much more important — thing: developers, developers, developers. MySpace has hitherto had something of a reputation for sending in the legal heavies after people who write widgets and add-ons for the platform. Facebook is the exact opposite, and positively encourages it, having released a complete API with full instructions on how to make a Facebook application.

This makes it the Swiss Army Knife of social networking websites, since there is so much that you can do with the platform. You can integrate Facebook with a whole lot of other services such as your own WordPress blog (my own blog posts get reproduced on my Facebook profile via the RSS feed) or even Wikipedia if you are that way inclined. A particularly useful application that has recently been launched is Google Reader Shared Items, which allows you to share interesting items in your RSS feeds with your friends very easily. Scoble loves it.

I think sites such as Facebook are also well placed to supplant e-mail as the primary one-to-one communication means of the Internet. Because you set up a network of friends, there is an element of trust there that makes it much easier to filter out spam, phishing and viruses. Of course, these nefarious characters tend to be a pretty crafty bunch, so vigilance is still necessary, but since there is an identifiable element of trust there, it is easier to filter it out or even block it altogether, by setting your profile so that only people you have accepted as friends can contact you through the system.

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Posted at 23:22 on 16 July 2007.
Tagged: Facebook, MySpace, social networking