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[Psylo]

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[whitewind]

Facebook update - doesn't affect me as I quit a while back, but those of you who still a member here's a bit of info you might be interested in. It made me laugh a lot, be honest, since when did they not realise that Facebook was just created to suck everyone in, post all their personal information, create an online database for governments and mega-corporations to find out about you, control you and sell you stuff, and incriminate you if you don't play ball?

from Avaaz

Dear friends,

This week, Facebook changed our email addresses on our profiles without our permission. It is making global news, but this is just a small part of Facebook’s grand plan to suck the entire free internet into their private company and control everything we do on the net to make the most profit for them. But we can stop this, because Facebook is nothing without us.

Worse than our email address hijacking, and off the media radar, Facebook has quietly just put our feeds up for sale -- now they are replacing the posts our friends want us to see with things that someone pays Facebook to show us. This is scary, but we have a window of opportunity to do something about it: the company has just listed on the stock market and are in a critical period of decision-making about their future. If we create a public storm on their site we could remind them that without us they don’t exist and these creepy moves are not good for business.

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the internet, has called Facebook its greatest threat. But a massive outcry of net users is the best way to get the company's attention. Sign the petition and tell everyone -- let’s get a massive wave of the nearly one billion Facebook users to tell them to stay true to what made them popular, and make profit by serving people, not tricking them:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/facebook_the_new_threat_to_the_net_c/?tta

Step by step Facebook is moving from a self claimed people-driven social network into a marketplace for advertisers to sell us stuff. But Facebook's selling out is not just about creepy advertising and what they show us, it's also about what they don't show us. The danger is that they will deliberately hide things that don't make them money, to make room for things that do. We've already seen signs of this happening in a number of ways.

Perhaps the best thing about the Internet is that it has empowered millions of people to organize through groups like Avaaz, but we've never told our 15 million members about our Facebook page, because we don't want them to join. Because if they did, Facebook rules would prevent us from messaging them about human rights, the environment or poverty. Why? Because there's no profit in it, and if charitable efforts want to reach a lot of people directly, Facebook wants them to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads. The press likes to talk a lot about Facebook's impact on social change, but the truth is that traditional email models of organizing that are truly people-powered, like Avaaz, are 10 times as effective as Facebook.

This is fight for facebook users and non facebook users alike -- if we don’t stop them now any net user could get trapped in Facebook’s path to a global internet monopoly. Let’s demand Facebook is transparent and provides what is important to us, not just corporate interests. Sign below now and tell everyone - when we reach 1 million voices Avaaz will advertise our campaign all over Wall Street and show investors the instability of the product they own:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/facebook_the_new_threat_to_the_net_c/?tta

The Internet is what it is because people have stood up and fought for it at every turn. Millions of Avaazers fought off corporate and government censorship efforts, and that fight is ongoing. But it's time to recognize that Facebook may be the most difficult threat we've yet faced. Let's rise to the challenge!

With hope and determination,

Maria Paz, Ben, Alice, Ricken, Lisa, Ari, Wen-Hua and the whole Avaaz team

MORE INFORMATION:

Facebook's email switch prompts criticism by users (BBC)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18590929

Facebook IPO pits privacy vs. profits (Politico)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76426.html

How you help Facebook make billions (CNNTech)

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/social-media/facebook-users-ads/index.html?iid=EL

Facebook's promoted posts: Pay to play, some say (Philadelphia Inquirer)

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/160337365.html

Facebook: the Honey Badger of Social Media (Mashable)

http://mashable.com/2012/06/25/facebook-dont-care/

[ballzac]

The trouble with facebook is that there is only value in using a service like that if it's the same one that everyone else is using, and that allows them to maintain a monopoly. At the moment it seems like facebook is here to stay, but I have a suspicion that they are getting too cocky and will start to push their customer base away. Whether this will be to google or not remains to be seen, and that depends on how google handles its own policies.

What really needs to happen is that someone creates a system that both secure and decentralised. Each member would maintain all ownership of anything they post as long as they already own it. Built into the system would be rules that prevent this from ever changing. Preferably, I think it should not be browser based. The basic interface would be a standalone program that is open source. Individual groups could bring out their own versions, which could be free and contain advertisements, or would require a small, paid subscription. Each version of the software would interact with the database differently, both in the information it sends when you, for example, post a comment, and also in the what information it acquires and how it is formatted on your screen. This would give consumers the choice of what software to use, and prevent a monopoly, and the different versions would all seem very distinct to the end user, but utilise the same information from the database.

I don't know how this would come about exactly, but it would be along similar lines to the development of linux.

[Darklight]

@Ballzac- have you tried Diaspora? Open source social networking

http://www.whatisdiaspora.com/

https://joindiaspora.com/

You can connect to your FB account via Diaspora too if you insist

Like you said, the thing about it is that if your friends aren't active there then there isn't much incentive to hang out there. I've been over there for months now and haven't yet gotten much response from any of the #tagged groups or gotten any of my FB friends to make the switch- they register an account but stay on FB

Haven't got the hang of the place yet but want to

It's browser based tho, from what I understand. I still don't quite get the 'pods' concept, maybe I need to hang out on a more active pod or something

[ballzac]

Hey, thanks for posting. I don't use facebook much anyway, but it's good to know there is possibly the seed of what I was describing already out there

[Justin Credible]

I like FB. I dont use chat, rarely msg friends, dont subscribe to my mates boring post about the weather and definately no Apps. When I open my FB page I see nothing but the news and events that interest me. I did not know till a week after that the Queen had been here...I like that. Also I dont use my primary PC for FB.