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You really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life. I wish I had something more substantive to say here, but the problem is that
by DanielBMarkham 14y ago
You really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life.
I wish I had something more substantive to say here, but the problem is that we give Facebook an extraordinarily huge power in our personal lives. It's not just some random web service.
- wmeredith 14y agoI certainly don't; I haven't given them anything. Google on the other hand...
- csmattryder 14y ago20 years old. No Facebook account. I 'deleted my life', and y'know what? Nothing changed. I still have the same friends I talked to before Facebook, still meet up for drinks on their birthdays, still arrange nights out, and still share what's going on in my life. The best thing about no Facebook? I know what information is out there, and nothing personal that Advertising Inc. can buy.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 14y ago25, no facebook account for over 3 years. Life's better without!
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoYou have a much easier story. I'm 47. Because of the network effect, using Facebook I've connected with people I knew and cared about that I haven't seen in 30 years. Dozens of them. I barely remembered person A and B, found them and became friends. Then they knew person C and D. E and F were close behind. Pretty soon I have 200 friends from places scattered all over the world. Life sneaks up on you, and people stop having the same phone, email, or street address. You wake up one day wondering what happened to Bob, then slowly realize that you'll never see him again. It's a weird feeling. Yes, if I were 20 and still had a cell phone with all my friends from 4 years ago, it'd be no big deal. But if I lost my FB data now? I'd never find these guys again. Personal sidebar ahead: by the way, my wife and I are having a competition to see who can get the most friends. As long as you're not selling anything, and I promise not to sell you anything, send me an invite! Right now she has 600 friends and I have something like 250. http://www.facebook.com/danielbmarkham http://www.facebook.com/danielbmarkham
- dhimes 14y ago$20 says your wife wins. :-)
- loopdoend 14y agoEither this is an attempt at irony, or you are what is wrong with Facebook.
- short_circut 14y agoI fail to see how using facebook to reconnect with disconnected friends is what is wrong with facebook. As a tool that is exactly what it is for.
- loopdoend 14y agoDid you not read the part about padding his friend list with strangers at the end there?
- potatolicious 14y agoWhat's wrong with wanting to interact with strangers? We've built entire startups around that - Meetup, GrubWithUs, Couchsurfing, etc, all come to mind. God didn't come down and carve the Approved And Valid Contexts of Facebook Friending on a piece of rock.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoIt is very interesting (and scary) how many things that we kludged together on the net that the new generation are finding as "must haves"
- ryguytilidie 14y agoPersonal sidebar ahead: by the way, my wife and I are having a competition to see who can get the most friends. As long as you're not selling anything, and I promise not to sell you anything, send me an invite! Right now she has 600 friends and I have something like 250.
- Swizec 14y agoI'm 25. One of my friends uses Google+ instead of FB. It's really weird because the only way I can really get in contact with him is via the irc channel we all hang out on. I never get to see any of the photos he shares.
- tsycho 14y agoIf you actually care about the photos that your friend is sharing on Google+, what's actually preventing you from seeing them? You don't even have to visit the G+ site, just set up email notifications if he/she shares anything with you. Let's look at an alternative scenario: What if your friend posted the photos online to Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa etc. and sent you a link via email? Would you still complain? My point is not to evangelize Google+ here, I am using it only because you referred to it. My point is that the power that FB has over your online social life is entirely up to you, and you can choose to increase/decrease it at will.
- Evbn 14y agoWhat if my friend posts on FB?
- tlrobinson 14y agohttp://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention... s/television/facebook/
- eertami 14y ago21 and find that it would be hugely inconvenient to delete my Facebook account. But this isn't for the social aspect, I don't post status updates or photos or share personal information (not even my Birthday), however Facebook Groups are just so widely used that it's hard to stay in the loop for certain things without them.
- jamesbritt 14y agobut the problem is that we ... The problem is for those people who decide to give FB huge powering their personal lives. I'm not among those, so there's no "we" for me here. _My_ problem is to try not sounding like a cranky old man when I often encourage people to move away from Facebook.
- saturdayplace 14y agoIf they actually will "delete your life" instead of keeping and mining it I wonder if messing with the "Facebook police" might not become an acceptable roundabout way of effectively wiping the online record clean for people who'd care to.
- sanukcm 14y agoSimilar to the "nuclear option" - post as much racist / homophobic / misogynistic hate speech and fetish porn as possible while adding as many strangers as you can. A friend mentioned this as an option back at the beginning of the "you can't delete - only disable your account" change a few years ago when Facebook made you go through a click maze and a waiting period before terminating your account. Idiotic, but illustrative of how frustrating Facebook's polices can be.
- swalsh 14y agoThis makes me remember a thought I was having a while ago. I'm not a fan of regulation on the internet, but there's some regulations i'd really like to see for the purpose of creating a more competitive atmosphere. They're probably too extreme today, but in the future I can see them being necessary as our lives increasingly become more digital. One of them is that all data I create, which is stored, I should have access to, programmatically preferably. If I sign up for a site like Facebook, and create data such as friend connections I should have direct access to that data. Without access, there's an anti-competitive atmosphere. It is near impossible for me to create a new social network today on a similar scale to Facebook, because people's data is locked up. Even Google+ with google's resources, and popularity couldn't get people to detach from Facebook. I watched as people enthusiastically went to Google+, but then left as they found everything they wanted to do with it was locked up elsewhere. It is true that Facebook has this data available on their API, however it also has the ability to choose who can use it. That's the problem. I feel this data should be available for the express purpose of allowing competition to flourish. of course there's other examples. Linked in has almost exclusive access to my resume + business contacts. Gmail has my life's history. Literally. I probably talk to my girlfriend on gchat more than when we're home. By the time we get home, there's nothing new :D Almost every big decision we've made has been while chatting at work. I can go back, and look at the record of our conversation I had when we came up with the name for my dog. Or when we decided to move to a different state, or when I told her my mom was hit by a car. No one company should be able to wipe out my life's memories. No one company should have exclusive access to this data. It is MY DATA (i realize the law doesn't recognize this as true yet, but it will). Every day as we move to digital lives, the services we use go from being fun things we do, to critical infrastructure. Those gchat logs are really important to me. Those facebook status conversations are important to me. I didn't choose facebook based on their features. It kind of just happened. But now its a part of my life (a lot of our lives). I want control over it.
- libber 14y agoSounds like this may interest you - https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/ https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/ Facebook wraps up every status update, picture, etc in a .zip file that you can download.
- gavinlynch 14y agoFor all the folks out there that are completely, and emphatically, 100% --ambivalent-- about Facebook and hardly use it, I say: Meh! Sincerely, A non-anti, non-pro barely-occasional, FB user :)
- dendory 14y agoDelete our lives?! Oh noes. Honestly, if you give one company that much power, then you're the foolish one. Same thing with a Kindle account, iCloud, SkyDrive, Twitter.. If you have valuable information in the cloud, back it up! I personally tried to "delete my life" a while back and the only reason I still have an (unused) Facebook profile is because it got reactivated at some point.
- fleitz 14y agoIt's a blessing in disguise being banned from Facebook would free up a lot of time.
- piokoch 14y agoI think that FB influence is largely overrated. As a matter of fact FB provides more convinient way to interact with friends. If one day FB disappear we can move to another social network. It is very likely that we have our closest friends' emails so we don't loose any actual connections. As far as not-that-close friends are concerned, many of us will be delighted that we don't have to keep them at social network any longer (I am speaking here about people who managed to gather together 500 friend and they don't really know 70% of them, but are just to polite to delete them). I guess if Dropbox would disappear or Google/Gmail would disappear or Flicker that would be really harmful for many people, but Facebook... Marketing people would be upset for some time, but average FB user will move to G+ or Diaspora or something similar in no time. In fact, we can see how good e-mail is, despite spam and phishing problems. The point is that nobody owns e-mail, it is open standard. In the IM space we have Jabber, which moves e-mail openess to IM world. In social area we need similar thing, the closest one is Diaspora, but we need something better. If it will be available then any larger portal would have it's own version, similarly as most portals offer e-mail accounts.
- samstave 14y agoI'd actually pay for the Facebook team to delete my online life! REALLY This needs to be a service... The problem is that its just like credit reporting: the data can be obfuscated from you - but not from everyone else who wants the data that is a part of "the system". Facebook is perm - thus I have never had an account and never will. Users can benefit from having a photo repos and a wall etc... but users suffer from corp and gov data mining of said data. fark that
- witoldc 14y agoYou can post your cat and dinner pics on G+. It's not the end of the world if they ban you. Aside from people using it to sell things/their business, most people will not lose much of anything. In fact, they will probably gain, since they won't be spending XXX minutes on FB each month.
- tambourine_man 14y agoIt's possible not to use it. Maybe someday it will be like not having a phone, or email, but in my experience, it's still not like that. Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware. WTF
- ghshephard 14y agoI think we make Facebook to me more than they really are - After using them for 5+ years, and accumulating the regular collection of 500+ friends and 40 or so family members, I finally got a little weirded out over how detailed the timeline was regarding my life. So, one day, I deleted my facebook account. I'm happy to report not a single thing changed in my life. No fewer parties, snowboarding events, burning man engagements, or family connections. Everyone who was my friend (Defined as "People who will come and help me move or visit me in hospital") remained my friend and keep in pretty much the same amount of contact.
- grey-area 14y agoYou really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life. Isn't that the risk of putting your personal data up on Facebook? If you fear them so much, why would you trust them with your online identity?