I'm in ur Facebookz Stealin' ur Privacyz!!111

Facebook is ubiquitous. It has become the de facto social networking site on the intertubes, and continues to trend upward. It offers users a suite of functionality including photos, news, messaging, games, gifts, videos, blogging, event planning and invitations, and much more. For many people it is their portal to the rest of the world and fulfills that narcissistic need we all have to varying degrees. In my own experience, much of the popularity of these kinds of sites are dependent on the evangelical recruitment of new members by existing ones. The site becomes more useful to you the more people you've converted and convinced to join. The system feeds itself. Brilliance.

Yet, I am tempted to turn my skeptical eye toward Facebook, due to its wild popularity and almost universal acceptance. Let's take a look at some of the current news relating to Facebook.

I'll let the darling Meme Molly give you a primer to the issue. In particular, Facebook has been slammed on its constantly changing privacy policies, which often cause information you freely shared with the site to end up in the hands of marketers and the general public unintended. Congressmen Charles Schumer and Al Fraken have publicly denounced Facebooks privacy policies. Accusations have been made that their interfaces are intentionally obtuse and make it difficult for you to keep your information private.

It wasn't always this way, however. Back in the day, the early adopters had little to fear over privacy concerns, but privacy creep has slowly eroded their protections. This visualization does an excellent job of illustrating the issue. If that's not enough to scare you, here are some bugaboos that might make you dirty your drawers: Five Hidden Dangers of Facebook, and 10 Reasons to Quit Facebook. In particular I like the Idiots of Ants sketch at the end of the second article.

Still not afraid? Well how about this: Openbook gives you an easy way to search public Facebook information for stuff people would probably be better off keeping to themselves, like "playing hooky" or "don't tell anyone" or my favorite "having a wank". Seriously people, the world does not need to know this shit. People get fired over this kind of thing, all the time.

What can you do to fight back? Well, the folks at the Consumerist have a couple of great suggestions. Senator Al Fraken even has some ideas. If I've sufficiently frightened you by now to leave Facebook behind then what will fill that horrible void? At the end of the Rocketboom clip you'll run into a group of endearing nerds, who claim to have the Facebook killer idea of an open source, distributed social networking site, diaspora. Also there's Appleseed, which could be available sooner than Diaspora. I hope both of these make it. We need diversity, people.

Personally, I prefer the do-it-yourself scattershot approach to distributed networking. I don't like having all my functionality under one roof. To me, linking everything to one account is ensuring that there will be a single point of failure, which is a bad idea from a software development stand-point. I like to find specific apps for specific needs, then if one thing fails, nothing else is affected. For photos I use flickr. For blogging, blogger. For events and invites, evite. Email, IM, and Twitter serve me just fine for messaging, although I have a few choice words for Twitter which I will get into on another post. For professional networking I use LinkedIn. Of course, Google covers just about everything else I need.

I think I've said just about everything I need to about this. I turn it over to you all now to discuss. What is it you like about Facebook? What do you hate? What would convince you to leave?