I always took SSR to be a 'serious' site; discussing as it does philosophy, constitutionalism and history. Now it has added the social whoring feather to its cap. There is an Australian Republicanism group on facebook.

I have probably been trolled by an editorial headline, but these articles annoy me. Facebook is a business yet somehow the headline, "Hey Facebookers, it's what you signed up for...", determines that Facebook has sold out. Then again this is the opening paragraph:

Surprise, surprise. Social networking internet site Facebook has begun selling advertisements to all the people now addicted to it. The same people -- Gen X and Y -- advertisers normally find so difficult to reach. Cash cow, anyone?

I guess Facebook's investors should provide the bandwidth, development cost, project costs, etc so users never have to face an economic trade off to the service.

Facebook has not been able to make money through advertising and is now focusing on selling access to its database instead:

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.

Prior to facebook the web was semi-anonymous, and the use of 'nicks' was the most common form of representing yourself on the web. Facebook changed that by forcing the use of your real name. Quite odd really, and people didn't seem to mind or care.

There is an element of transience to these sites. Users tend to wander around the internet follow social groups from one site to the next in an almost migratory fashion of social dispersion and coagulation. It is parallel diasporanism on a grand scale.

It is currently facebook but it has been plenty of other sites in my - increasing - years I have been on the internets. Why I recall when baud was so scarce we would trade hens teeth for it young fella (I wore an onion on my belt as that was the fashion of the day).

I deleted my facebook profile. While I am not entirely in the facebook is evil category, the third order effects and how it makes friends of friends items public to you is not a positive. I recently increased my privacy settings but given that there are things I don't want to know, and that I don't use the social networking facebook offers, I decided to delete the profile altogether. I never looked at it much, so won't miss it.

The NY Times has a graphic on the growth of facebook. In the last year the highest growth demographic has been the over 35s. The main worth of facebook for me had been my sister posted a lot of her news and pictures of my little nephew. But she has been doing that through email as well.

Anyway, this over 35 has deleted his profile. I have been on the internets long enough to have traveled around each new form of social gathering and connectivity the internet provides, from BBS, to IRC, to the first of the big websites like slashdot etc. I am sure facebook will survive in one form or another, I also don't doubt some other tool will come along and dislodge it as the social networking site of choice.

An interesting exploration of what is public and private and how, while it is in the interests of those running social media websites to make everything public, even forcibly, it is not in the interest of those on the websites.

The counter argument is that you don't have to have a facebook website. I don't. I made the decision recently not to. One of the reasons for me doing so was the lack of privacy and how facebook made aspects of my profile more public than I wanted. After I played with the privacy settings it was obvious that deleting was the easiest option. I haven't missed it. I still manage relationships and networking via email, IM and txt message though I don't get the person I knew from high school wandering across me in that mechanism.

The article that I linked to assumes that everyone will be on facebook, twitter, myspace, or whatever the next form of socially networked media is. But I don't think people will, I know a lot of people that have made conscious decisions not be on those websites for differing reasons of privacy and I suspect that will continue to the case. It isn't an a-priori, people can say no to joining websites like that.