Sunday, January 27, 2008

Facebook is evil...

...well, not really. But I was really hoping to be a good sport and give it a go. Even reading all of those warnings on the KRL2.0 site didn't totally scare me away. But then, that darn first page of Facebook forces you to put in a full name. What??!? Isn't that the first rule of online safety and the first step towards maintaining your anonimity? I attempted a few ways around this - I tried doing my first name and last initial, I tried Mrs [name] (with no periods to try to fool the programmers). I even thought I was being cute and tried to use Missus [name] when it wouldn't let me do anything else. After being blocked from about 5 combinations, I absolutely gave up.

Why is this a requirement? And once I started feeling odd about that whole name business, I started to think over all of those warnings again about how hard it is to delete the profile once it's been created and how there are programs which then track so much of your personal activity on the computer and send that activity to your friends. So, no facebook participation for me.

But, in the end, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't even see the KRL page or surf around on the site a bit. I'm not really sure that I can see how social networking sites would be useful in the workplace though. That suggested blogpost made some good points about making your library visible to more people, I suppose. But, well, hmmmm.... I'm still on the fence on this one.

1 comment:

krl2pt0 said...

i do think that a lot of the criticism facebook has received is well-deserved. however, i do think there are legitimate reasons behind the two concerns you raised.

1) about the name thing - fb does try to verify that every profile that is set up is a real person. when they find one that uses a false identity they strip it off. this is to prevent some of the problems that occurred on myspace. in part, this requirement also goes back to how it was initially started - as a site for college students only. you have to have a college id to set up an account when fb first started - again, to keep people from created false identities and trolling profiles.

2) deleting an account - i think there are technical reasons for not being able to just delete your profile. fb has a huge SQL database underneath it. everytime someone adds a friend or an application, it creates links in the database from their profile to others. for example - one of the applications allows you to send "good karma" to all of your friends. each time you do it, it creates more links.

i think that is behind the reason for having people strip everything off their profile before it can be deleted.

if you're still interested in seeing the krl page, here's what i've seen a number of people do - set up a profile and don't put anything else on it, other than your name. then you can view the krl page (become a fan if you'd like), but not have any personal information out on the web, other than your name.

let me know if you have any questions or qualms about that - i'd be happy to share my impressions, both good and bad, about fb.

bc