I found it really interesting that only 30,000 out of 400,000,000 people deleted their profiles on 31st May, out of protest to Facebook’s privacy changes, actually went through with it. Not hugely surprising though.
The amount of times I have heard my friends say “I am going to delete my FB profile, I am sooooo ovah it”, is too frequent to count. But none of them have gone through with it and when I hear it now I glaze over and muttering something supportive like ‘Oh really…monkey dishwasher hee haw.” To me they are idle threats like "I am so not drinking this month", "We are only friends" or "it's not you its me", I just file it under W for whatever.
The reason I don't believe them is that this unassuming site has become such a social behemoth, that for a user to opt out of the pool now, would be like throwing your mobile phone down the toilet cause your bored of talking on it.
Admit it or not, FB is the future and time will tell if competitors join the market and manage to stave off being sent to the same binary code graveyard as MySpace. We could even see FB merge into other yet launched or successful competitive sites to create a single self governing communication device, like Internet 3.0. Who knows, I could chew the microchip for hours on this.
True… FB at the 11th hour did a wee U-Turn on its privacy policy, that would make K-Rudd proud, even though it was relatively easy to protect yourself and I maintain even without this reversal, only a small amount of people would have deleted their profiles anyway. I REALLY want to know who of those who did delete will quietly rejoin in the next weeks..time will tell.
At the heart of this argument is that FB is not for the wallflower who wants to quietly chirp away with their 13 friends, it is a cyber soapbox to announce what your up to, to show all the cool things you have seen and done as well as interact and stay in touch with your friends – near or far. Simple as that. People who are on FB are by definition, not private people.
Another point to digest, is that FB is free. FREE!!! For all the old friends and scary exes you are now happily matey matey with online, but would ignore at the supermarket, you have not paid for any friend request. For all the photos you can share and random parties in Bulgaria you can be invited to…none of this has come at a cost. I am grateful i can keep in touch with all my friends and random party meets from around the globe. It was always a certainty that FB was going to try and implement some kind of revenue model, it was unfortunate thouigh that it was announced in a rather ham-fisted and autocratic way. That was sucky.
Now before I am faxed un-smiley faces of death or computer viruses attack me in a dark alley, I would like to state that I am not a FB mouth piece, I don't like the stirrings of FB going beyond the egalitarian model of keeping people connected… to helping brands to keep connected to people for $$$. But for the most part I really enjoy it and accept it for what it is, it’s not perfect but I don’t want to go backwards either.
Let's be realistic..FB or it's future incarnation/s is not going away, but if this teaches us anything it is us who have keep FB honest, as the privacy debate proved. Without people FB is just another site, so it's up to those who use it and keep the original ethos and user friendly policy for the site that got the world's knickers truly in a cyber knot.
So rest assured that I for one will continue to use Facebook to announce I ate a large meatball sub and am regretting it, or I fell down the stairs at work again or even to simply sent my friends a stupid link to a cat riding a unicycle.
