

Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook - ivankirigin
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573

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brlewis
This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote:

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this.
It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's
a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now
wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now
kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but
who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

~~~
Dauntless
I admit I have a lot of pending friends' requests... I was hoping they were
going to expire but it looks like Facebook haven't implemented this very
useful feature.

~~~
smelendez
Just click the decline/ignore/whatever button. It doesn't tell them.

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raghus
By 10am this morning, a friend of mine had already taken two movie quizzes and
a trivia challenge - as faithfully reported by Flixster's PublishActionOfUser.
I wonder what happens if her co-worker and FB friend, who might not like her
too much shows her FB profile to their boss. It's one thing to let people
waste time on your site - it's quite another to tell everyone exactly what
they did and when they did it.

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damien
I've never understood how Facebook got to be so big in the first place with
their policy of requiring to sign up to do anything. I've never needed to see
a Facebook page that badly that I'd want to spend the time signing up for yet
another website that I never use. (And why is Facebook banned from BugMeNot?)

Facebook is the new AOL... hadn't thought of it that way, but it does seem
like an appropriate analogy.

~~~
Xichekolas
Easy. Facebook was seen as the in thing on campus. If you had a Facebook
profile, you were hip and cool and cutting edge. After a few months in 2004 it
got to the point that not having a profile meant people simply forgot who you
were (because they couldn't read your profile like they could everyone elses).
Obviously it influenced none of your close friends, but people you just met
would judge you by your profile and decide whether or not to include you in
the future.

It was also a great way to find your friend's hot friends and set up a meeting
somehow.

The fact you had to give them your college email address and a password was no
barrier. Heck, not having to choose a user name or design your profile
yourself made it _easier_ to sign up.

(I can answer this since I was in college at the time it got started.)

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brlewis
I don't think you've really answered his question. If not having a profile
meant people simply forgot who you were, then you're talking about a time when
facebook was already big.

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dnaquin
well there was transition. when people realized, hey i can invite everyone to
my party and not actually have to go around inviting people or posting signs
around campus. if you weren't on facebook, you weren't finding out about the
parties. simple.

really, every decision of the masses can be attributed to laziness?

~~~
brlewis
At the point when Facebook was a viable substitute for posting signs, there
must have already been a lot of people using Facebook.

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andreyf
It's funny how quickly moods vary between "facebook is unstoppable" to
"facebook is in a nosedive for disaster"... They seem to be good at listening
to users and fixing mistakes, but they don't seem to have much foresight in
their strategies -

Integrating my Amazon purchases onto my feed? Kind of neat, but I already do
that with anything I want to share via a bookshare application...

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dreish
Excuse me if this is a bad idea, since I ditched the social network trend
after a few minutes on Friendster some years ago.

It seems that the design ought to have however many different levels of
friends you want, with the inner circles seeing everything on your page that
the outer circles can see, plus some more, without necessarily knowing the
name of the circle they're in. That way you could have Public (not friended at
all) < Acquaintances < Business associates < Family < Close friends (or vice
versa, or combining the previous two, depending on how you relate to your
family) < Secret circle of shame.

Or a directed acyclic graph instead of a single path, I guess, as long as you
only allow people access to that feature if they promise they understand how
to use it. (Whose social life is that complicated?)

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brianmckenzie
I think Doctorow overstates the awkwardness of ignoring a friend request.
People do it all the time, I know I do, and I've _never_ accepted a 'top
friends' request.

There's a hidden benefit if people use the 'ignore' feature properly: you get
a better idea of who your friends are. Someone ignoring a friend request can
be very telling.

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johnarama
I still prefer MySpace...more fun to use...

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alaskamiller
This Facebook backlash trend is interesting.

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jotto
i think the trend is only with the tech-crowd, we'll see if this spreads to
non-techy people, but i think the myspace crowd enjoys where facebook is at
right now - self expression, maximum friend count etc...

you can get value out of facebook, just add the friends who are truly in your
inner-circle, or those that were and moved away.

you can also prevent yourself from being searched for, so when someone else
says i can't find you on facebook, you can say a) oh, i'm not on facebook, or
b) oh i have the privacy settings on, i'll send an invite to you

~~~
nickb
Hmm... Facebook is full of techie crowd. All those college people are quite
competent when it comes to using the Web. All you need is one: "X purchased
[porn dvd] from Y" in your feed and all your 'friends' are gonna laugh at you
and ridicule you and it will leave you with sour feeling in your mouth. Or
they'll criticize your tastes and judge you by the crap you buy.

Exodus from FB has already begun.

~~~
sspencer
Pfft. Anyone who would ridicule me for buying porn is right to do so. Porn is
freely available on the internet.

Seriously, though: I could care less about what shows up on the feeds. Anyone
who would criticize or judge me for what I buy isn't among my friends, in real
life or on facebook. Worried about your boss (as Doctorow says, you pretty
much have to friend this one if they come a-courtin') seeing too much? Just
twiddle the privacy settings so he or she only sees the most innocuous of
updates.

While there are many valid criticisms of facebook, I have never worried once
about the ones you listed.

Just my 2 cents.

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sabat
Corey Doctorow is a tool.

OK, that's argumentum ad hominem, so let's look at why he's being a tool this
particular here time.

Bullshit argument. If you don't want to hear from the guy who beat you up,
don't add him -- or better yet, write back and say "you beat me up, and you're
lucky I don't track you down and let the air out of your tires every day for a
week."

Social networks are not for pussies. They're for people who are ready to face
society and its weirdos.

Perhaps Corey Doctorow isn't just a tool, but also a pussy.

~~~
nostrademons
Having been on lots of social networks (DeadJournal, LiveJournal, Friendster,
uJournal, Plogs, MySpace, and Facebook, in that order), Doctorow's basically
right-on when it comes to what real people do. I've had friends tell me,
several times, "We're all on (GreatestJournal|MySpace|Facebook) now; come join
us." Mass migrations between social networks are not as rare as people who are
on their first social network tend to think.

Maybe ordinary people are pussies too.

~~~
sabat
"Mass migrations between social networks are not as rare as people who are on
their first social network tend to think."

Is that what Corey is complaining about? I read that he hates being stalked. I
think he likes complaining about hating being stalked. Regardless, the fear of
social networking because the "wrong" people might find you -- that's what
makes Corey a pussy.

What difference does it make if your friends move to new social nets? No one
is forcing you to do anything. Politely tell them you're giving up social
networking.

In any event: much ado about nothing.

