[ExI] Facebook is freaking me out

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 8 23:28:18 UTC 2008


2008/9/9 Max More <max at maxmore.com>:
> Emlyn--one thing I would suggest is, right away, decide whether you want to
> restrict your "friends" to *actual* friends, or whether you want to add
> hundreds of people you don't really know but have some vague connection
> with. If you don't decide now, you may end up doing the latter by default
> while wishing for the former. I think both approaches make sense, but
> FaceBook will run away out of control unless you decide between them right
> away.
>
> Max
>

Thanks for the heads-up Max. I'm not sure that I'm actually popular
enough for this to matter. I'm kind of liking the proliferation of
weak ties, but it might eventually be nice to differentiate a bit. Can
you do that on Facebook? I guess it's a faux pas to mark someone up
with public information on how close a friend they are, rating out of
10 or some such. I don't know, I'm such a nub.

I can feel a rambling rant coming on...

I'm really enjoying this whole web 2.0, social network thing, it's so,
well, shiny! New toys to play with, more than you can keep track of,
fun! And, there does seem to be some core to it that will last beyond
the inevitable correction, something real has been invented here.

I love the "cloud", I've been a fanboi since before it was cool. I've
always hated running my own servers, and am under no illusions that I
can run anything in production at anywhere close to the quality of the
big guys. I must confess though that I find the current state of the
"cloud" is a bit early railroad for my tastes. Lots of closed
commercial stuff, not much thought for interoperability, for the
ability to move data from one server to another. That's been fine
because the concepts behind a lot of services have still been fuzzy,
but I think things are bedding down enough that we need to begin to be
a bit more demanding about these things.

What really makes me uneasy is the dominance of closed source. So,
where I can, I'm trying to choose free software based solutions over
closed commercial stuff. eg: for blogs, I favour Wordpress. One of the
most important feature sets, to me, are the import/export options,
combined with the fact that anyone can host it, many do, and I could
if I absolutely had to (which I really don't want to, but I could, in
theory).

I'm sure I was coming to a point, but someone wants me to sign up to
twitter. Ooh, shiny!

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
http://point7.wordpress.com - downshifting and ranting
http://speakingoffreedom.blogspot.com - video link feed of great talks
on eCulture



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