Don’t have a FB or a myspaz, bebo etc etc account, and never plan to get one… I’m a total social networking luddite (cept for PV and one or 2 other forums where my net footprint can be kept manageable)…

For me it’s a total lack of trust thing with most of the places – ever since the corporate web takeover started I’ve had problems with their whole reason for doing some of the things they do, and I am especially suspicious of any big corporation, or venture capital backed network that has no obvious profit stream (because that means they must have non-obvious profit streams)…

Mostly they claim non-invasive marketing research and targetted advertising as their profit (along with others like google, yahoo etc), but that to me sounds like a quick glossing over – for the market research targetting to be meaningful it needs to be at least a little invasive, as it needs to connect you with the things it is targetting you as maybe wanting (so at the very least some form of link tracking connected to your IP or username).

In the case of something like Amazon where they track what you look at on their site, and try and suggest things you might be interested in the profit mechanism is obvious – they can sell you more stuff (hopefully). In the case of google, the reason for the tracking metric is also relatively obvious (their whole search engine is based partially on what you do after getting search results from them), and the profit can be seen to come from the advertising they do based on your searches (although I am slightly suspicious of google these days as well, and how much info they collect and store).

But with Facebook I don’t see the profit aspect – considering it’s had over £300 million in venture capital you would expect to see an obvious way for it to make money (it claimed it’s first positive cash flow in 2009), but (and I may be being dumb here), I see no obvious way. Advertising is the only revenue stream I can see, and considering the amount of trouble google goes to to get ad cash, you would expect FB to be equally pushy ad wise, but it isn’t…

The fact that FB has the ability to collect FAR more info than something like google also worries me (plenty of people have very intimate facts about themselves published in their profiles), and their willingness to roll over and be the tart of any authority that asks them to makes putting any info on there a nono AFAIAC- at least google tell the DoJ to get bent when they get subpoena’d for the stored data – and fight and win their case. FB wouldn’t even fight the subpoena (as they say in their privacy statement).

The rest of the stuff like the censorship nonsense (I don’t really believe in censorship as a rule – most of the dumb stuff that ends up censored actually gains credibility by being censored – if exposed to the light of reason and debate, it generally withers and crawls off into a hole where it belongs), the various privacy screw ups like making loads of previously private stuff public without telling you, and the

thing just reinforce the cold feet really…

Hmmmm. Got carried away again (and a tiny bit off topic)… Still, my 2 penneth for what it’s worth :wink:.

Oh yeah . :rant::rant::rant:

And putting info about free parties on FB is so far beyond stupid it’s reached the calm waters of drooling gently into your chest that results from too much breakfast cereal…:you_crazy

If you’re doing it about parties you aren’t organising then you’re putting those that do at risk unnecessarily (getting people to free parties doesn’t need you to shout about them – people will get there anyway), and if you’re doing it about your own parties then expect to find trouble at every turn… Maybe not immediately, but it will happen (unless you are very very lucky)… :rant::rant::rant::rant::rant:

Using a FB group like that for disinformation purposes though :idea:….. That might have possibilities (post saying your party is one side of the county, and actually have it 100 miles away on the other side of the county…)