See where this is going? [original]

The Electronic Frontier Federation (EFF) recently published timeline of Facebook’s eroding private policy. What really irks me is how Zukerberg suckered people into Facebook, and slowly but methodologically took  away your rights and your ability to control your own information and profile. I’ve always live by this:

“Never expect anything you reveal on the internet to be private, no matter what anyone tells you”

And for good reason, because what is even more disturbing is the fact that Facbook will store your information even after you delete it.

While some have quit Facebook completely I haven’t made that kind of bold leap yet. Until another social network comes along that appeals to me, I’ll probably stick with it (And if you think Facebook will never fall, well… that’s what people said about Myspace not even 5 years ago). That doesn’t mean I won’t take some sort of action. Ever since Facebook took away my control of who can comment on my notes on Facebook, I’ve stopped importing my blog’s RSS feed. I’ve replace most Facebook status updates with Twitter updates (I recently reached 5000 tweets!), replaced a majority of my shared links with Google Reader Shared Items / Google Buzz and I don’t even post as many photos as I used to (keeping a majority of them on Flckr instead). Yes, that’s my little stand against Facebook, for now.

Every CEO of a social network should be required to use the default privacy settings for all of their accounts on the service.
- anildash

additional reading:

• Electronic Frontier Federation
• Wikipedia entry : “Criticisms of Facebook (Privacy Concerns)”
• The most important difference between Google Buzz and Facebook

Besides the theme change:

1. I’ve added a twitter feed as well as a Google Buzz feed to the sidebars. I’m not so sure about the twitter, I may remove it later since my account is protected for a good reason. Ok I’m lying. It’s only protected to prevent spam followers, I’ve got nothing to hide … honest!
2. I’ve enabled Pushubbub
3. I’ve disabled comments on the blog <- Scratch that, I’ll just leave comments on. No-one comments here anyway lol.
4. I’ve also disabled auto Facebook updates. Instead, I’m trying out this Post to Facebook plugin instead. Should give me more choices in terms of how the post shows up on Facebook, as well as let me omit posts from showing up there at all.  Honestly I’ve never been a fan of how posts show up as “Notes” on FB, no embeds and… yeah.

About my decision to disable comments on the blog? Well its not like people leave comments here anyway. Most of my replies come via twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook. I’m still trying to figure out a way to combine all these comments at one centralized source. Until then, I’ll probably leave comments here disabled. Hell, I would disable comments on Facebook too if it let me. They used to! I don’t know why they don’t anymore. *grumbles*

Enough ranting, I’ll probably make some other minor tweaks here and there. The Google Buzz widget is not functional enough for my tastes yet (doesn’t even let you clock on the Buzzes), but that’s ok, cause you should just be following me on Buzz instead. Other changes I’ll probably (sneakily) make within the next week month: add a flickr stream thingamabob and maybe get some site banners/headers up (although I kind of like the plain-ness of it all).

ps. The new theme may of killed some of the formatting for my old posts, but I’m not really going to bother with fixing them.
pps. Crap on a stick, strike-throughs don’t seem to be working at the moment.
ppps. Ok, running into some problems with the post to Facebook plug-in, it posts to Facebook properly, except it takes the text from my Google Buzz widget as the “preview” for the post, so I gotta delete it manually …. need to find a way around it. Or possibly a new plugin. But first, sleep.

Google buzz isn’t a Facebook replacement; It’s also not a Twitter replacement. It is a much improved version of Google Reader Shared Items (GRSI), with a better comment system and a whole lot less buggy (Don’t even get me started on how much I actually hated GRSI). Yeah, I actually like Google Buzz.

Likes:
Gmail integration
Comment notification (yeah I know alot of people whine about it, but you can easily set up a filter to have it bypass the inbox)
Realtime updates
Comments show up on GRSI for those who refuse to make the leap to Buzz

Dislikes:
I wish they would use the “compact” mode like how shared items show up in GRSI, that way I can scan though all these buzzes quickly.
How a buzz that has been recently commented get bumped to the top again. This should be optional/disabled (how the hell will I ever get through all these Buzzes. Are they even called Buzzes? Argh)
A “re-buzz” option would be nice too.
The sharing dilemma*
It would be nice if in the event that two (or more) people I follow posting the same thing on Buzz, it should be stacked and not show up as separate buzzes. (Not sure how well that would work out, actually…)

The Sharing Dilemma:
Prior to Google Buzz, anything I though worth sharing would be posted to Facebook and GRSI. If it was funny enough, then it would be posted to Twitter too.

After Google Buzz, well things got complicated. Witch such a large overlap,the decision is not as straightforward. I think I’ll go with posting things on Buzz and see how that works (although if its really good I guess I can still repost to FB and Twitter. I Kinda feel sorry for the people who are in the centre of the Venn Diagram though)

ps. It just occurred to me that Buzz would make a great metablogging platform. I hope this will reduce the amount of Twitter ranting I see (You know who you are! I mean there’s a 140 character limit on Twitter for a damn reason!!!)

1. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Add your site and complete the verification process
3. In  Google Buzz, your site should now appear in the “connected sites”, share it and you are done!