Facebook, Privacy and the Alternatives

A crazy amount of digital ink has been spent lately taking Facebook to task, and demonizing Mark Zuckerberg, calling for a boycott of the site in response to the privacy changes.  (Random side note Engadget hasn't said a peep about this it seems, either that or they pulled the content.)

The boycotting and leaving Facebook is an interesting cunundrum given that Facebook actually provides some value to many of its users.  That value may just be satisfying their voyeur needs into the lives of their "friends", but it is a way to maintain some level of contact with those that are far away from us.  Every now and then you learn things that you might have not known, or encounter very odd situations with divorces or fighting couples.  Is any of this useful, valuable, or worthwhile?  I don't know that it isn't.

I thought that this was an interesting alternative design to counter Facebook's Monolithic scale, the idea is to give you a higher degree of control over what you share.  I think that they certianly choose the best possible time to launch, but given the time it will take them to get off the ground it likely will have fallen off of people radar by then.  People have short attention spans and the news doesn't know what a follow up report is, so I don't expect to ever hear about this "Alternative" again.

Facebook login trouble?

Any one else unable to login to Facebook today?




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Update 2pm pst
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Back up.

Facebook for all the hype....sucks

Huh, all the sudden I don't like to read several of my blogs. I must have missed it but somewhere along the line everybody drank some Facebook koolaide and lost their fucking common sense. To the engineers that are leaving Google to join Facebook google is my all day sexy, Facebook gets about 3-10mins a day total of my time. I am logged into my gmail account every second I am near a computer, I check my hotmail and yahoo once per day each and check myspace 3-4 times per day. I normally only go to Facebook if some one sends me a message, otherwise I try hard not to think about it and the oxygen wasted world wide talking about it.

On the other hand I use nearly every service that Google has to offer, Notebook is my savior, Reader was my replacement for bloglines (I haven't looked back nor been disappointed with that switch yet), Maps is likely the only reason I am not dead somewhere after trying to "wing it" on the directions. I blog on Blogger, I use Feedburner, Analytics, Adsense, I encourage every picture taking person I know to use Picasa. I have started using code search to help my sad attempts at coding, and absolutely love Goog-411.

Finally what is not sexy about a company that lest you spend 20% of your time on a personal project. Are you freaking serious?! I only wish that I could find some time to not run around at my job and work on some of the collaboration that my company so desperately needs.