Yesterday I saw the rather startling statistic that the average Facebook user views a whopping 27 pages on each visit. Of course the story goes on to explain that this huge surge in page views on Facebook has devastated the news portals which just a few years ago devastated newspapers and their websites.
Of course I am on the fence in my understanding of the popularity of Facebook. It is definitely a useful tool just as much as it is an enormous waste of time. The plethora of time wasting games and tedious updates and outright bitching that Facebook users engage in on the site is not just hard to understand -- it's troubling.
On the other hand, as I said, it is vastly useful. Facebook is basically a community bulletin board. You can post the trivial updates from your sad and pathetic day to day life and post way too many snapshots. But in exchange for using this free community bulletin board known as Facebook, they own it. They own it all. The terms of service are so vast and complicated that nobody, outside of a few highly techie folks, really read or understand them and those are the folks that have publicly deleted their accounts. Not because they are ashamed of what they are sharing but because the nerd behind Facebook could turn around tomorrow and change the TOS and sell every bit of information users have given up the rights to and we'd be even more relentlessly spammed than we currently are.
But in my eyes it's a necessary evil. It's the current hot spot and even though posting content there gives Facebook the right to do whatever they please with it, Facebook does actually drive traffic and increase readership. It's necessary because it's hugely popular. It's evil because once people move en masse to the next bigger and better network (hey, I used to use MySpace) Facebook's nerdy owner will get desperate even with his huge stacks of cash and he could very well peddle all of the information that has been collected via Facebook to persons or companies with less-than-good intentions.
In all reality, I give Facebook another two years at the most before users begin migrating to whatever comes next. It's part of the evolution of the internet. The users haven't gone anywhere, it's just the places where they congregate that has changed.
But some things haven't changed. MinnPics, nearing its second birthday, is even better than you remember. Check out the best photos from all over Minnesota now!
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
It's not so much the sharing as it is the oversharing
Privacy seems to be at the top of everyone's minds right now. If you haven't been paying attention, Facebook is taking a lot of heat for its relatively lax approach towards their users' privacy. Sure, I've used Facebook for a few years myself and for about two years to promote a couple arms of the company I work for but I've always been careful what sort of information I put online for all to see. And the "for all to see" thing may be totally incorrect because I have my Facebook account (my personal one) locked down like a chastity belt just because I don't want everyone to know everything about me.
It's not that I have a ton to be ashamed of but I post photos of my daughter there and while I can't speak for her, I am fairly certain that at some point she'll want to have control of her own life and what aspects of it are made public.
That's what I don't quite get about today's generation of teens. They are the first to come of age in an era where everything can be shared online instantly. The key word there is "can" - nobody has ever said "share it all" because there is plenty that others don't need (or want) to know or flat out shouldn't know.
For instance, I'm not going to tell you what kind of underwear I'm sporting but I'll gladly tell you that I'm wearing a nearly two year old pair of Converse One Star sneakers that are dangerously close to disintegrating while I wear them. It's all about selective sharing.
But back to Facebook... I'd love nothing more than to see a company who has done nothing more than give people a place to play pointless games and share way too much meet its demise. They have been loose with the privacy of users and that needs to change. However, Facebook's owner has found a lucrative way to profit from giving people something they obviously love and collecting information they are very willing to freely give up so Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is simply profiting by being a middle man. After all, the internet is all about information and people expect websites to be free. Maybe we've become too lax in how we control our personal information and maybe a few years from now things will be vastly different and people will be far more reluctant to share every tiny detail of their lives. Maybe people will find something more productive to do with their times rather than asking everyone they know to help them with their barn raising.
Maybe if Facebook had never existed we wouldn't have experienced a huge financial meltdown in the past few years. Maybe people, instead, would have been reading the very mortgage contracts that sent them to bankruptcy. But what's done is done so let people continue oversharing but also let them realize that those photos from last night when they were naked and smoking ditch weeb from a bong might hamper their job prospects down the road.
But not all sharing is bad because without people sharing their awesome photos of Minnesota, MinnPics wouldn't exist.
It's not that I have a ton to be ashamed of but I post photos of my daughter there and while I can't speak for her, I am fairly certain that at some point she'll want to have control of her own life and what aspects of it are made public.
That's what I don't quite get about today's generation of teens. They are the first to come of age in an era where everything can be shared online instantly. The key word there is "can" - nobody has ever said "share it all" because there is plenty that others don't need (or want) to know or flat out shouldn't know.
For instance, I'm not going to tell you what kind of underwear I'm sporting but I'll gladly tell you that I'm wearing a nearly two year old pair of Converse One Star sneakers that are dangerously close to disintegrating while I wear them. It's all about selective sharing.
But back to Facebook... I'd love nothing more than to see a company who has done nothing more than give people a place to play pointless games and share way too much meet its demise. They have been loose with the privacy of users and that needs to change. However, Facebook's owner has found a lucrative way to profit from giving people something they obviously love and collecting information they are very willing to freely give up so Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is simply profiting by being a middle man. After all, the internet is all about information and people expect websites to be free. Maybe we've become too lax in how we control our personal information and maybe a few years from now things will be vastly different and people will be far more reluctant to share every tiny detail of their lives. Maybe people will find something more productive to do with their times rather than asking everyone they know to help them with their barn raising.
Maybe if Facebook had never existed we wouldn't have experienced a huge financial meltdown in the past few years. Maybe people, instead, would have been reading the very mortgage contracts that sent them to bankruptcy. But what's done is done so let people continue oversharing but also let them realize that those photos from last night when they were naked and smoking ditch weeb from a bong might hamper their job prospects down the road.
But not all sharing is bad because without people sharing their awesome photos of Minnesota, MinnPics wouldn't exist.
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