And Death to Facebook

Read an excellent article today that rather well articulates the feeling I have been getting lately about Facebook. Sadly, now that I think about it, I think Shana made this same argument some time ago, when she was 'cleaning up' her online presence. To save you reading the whole article, here is the snippet that really illustrates the point (with a +5 Burning Man reference!):

Here's one of Boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

I think it just comes down to the fact that we don't diagram and distribute a list of our friends in real life for this very reason. There are some people you don't bring home to mom, and there are some activities that you don't talk about with your boss. Facebook and it's ilk do exactly that if your mom, boss, and drunk friends all happen to be your Facebook friends too. It's not like I am ashamed of anyone, and I think most people are pretty realistic in not judging you by such things, but the problem arises when someone uses Facebook to look up information about you for something important, as some colleges and employers have been doing before accepting students and hiring. Why have a bad image out there?

Now the question is, do I have the guts to pull the trigger on my account? It does have it's useful features, like keeping in touch with my professors in Spain, and looking up phone numbers and email addresses. None of my friends are remotely questionable as far as I know, and I have already cleaned up my profile quite a bit. How much value does Facebook really provide?

If only we could get rid of those damn applications. If I get one more notification I'm going to go berserk.