Usernames Will Kill Facebook
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Let's talk about this weekend's other big media quake.
No, not the switch to digital television broadcasting. I figure that only a few old ladies in Boise are going to be left behind on that one, though you will never know it from the media storm.
I'm talking 'bout Facebook.
To the amusement and (at times, no doubt) chagrin of my children, nieces and nephews, I enjoy my time on Facebook. It has given me a chance to catch up with cousins, friends and co-workers who slipped out of touch over the years. And since I no longer work in a bustling newsroom, but in quiet research libraries or at my desk in our converted attic, Facebook helps me escape, virtually, from a writer's monkish seclusion.
But Facebook is undergoing a big change. Tomorrow morning at a minute after midnight, its gazillion members will get to choose a username, which will open their Facebook page to easy Google searches and other intrusions from the world wide web.
Over at The Daily Beast, the media writer, Douglas Rushkoff, explains what this means.
Its only competitive advantage in the Internet space—it's only reason for being—was that it was more personal, more closed off, and arguably more private than the Internet itself.
Now my Facebook home page will be just one more home page on the net. And that raises an interesting question.
Now that we'll be quickly findable via Google, what's left to distinguish this social-networking site from the social network that is ... the Internet?
Without such a raison d'etre, he says, Facebook may be doomed.
That shift, I believe, portends the beginning of the end for this social network," he writes. "That may sound preposterous, but the short history of the Internet is littered with quickly fallen giants. They all appear to be permanent features of the digital landscape—Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Napster, CompuServe—until they're not. A minute after midnight on Saturday may just be the moment 200 million more people find themselves thrown firmly onto the Internet, and in the process make Mark Zuckerberg's digital wading pool obsolete."
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Tags: internet | Facebook | social networking
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Reader Comments
Oh look...
...another old dude, that doesn't understand that just becuase Google can see that your Facebook profile exists, doesn't mean that it can see everything on it.
Not understanding how to use privacy settings, and then publishing an article like this, makes you look like a top notch goon.
If one knows what one is doing on Facebook, one can have one's family and employers as friends, and still put those drunken crotch shots online without embarrassing oneself any more than one did when they were taken. It's not something I would recommend doing, but it is possible, if one doesn't ignore the privacy settings like the bumbling writer of this article did, one can be perfectly safe on Facebook from the clutches of the internet. In fact, most of your information is completely hidden by default, so if they aren't your "friend", the general public isn't going to see very much about you at all, even if they have your "username".
To Hattie in CA
You don't understand things like Facebook and Twitter because you're mature and know how to behave like such. There are actually people in their FORTIES who use these sites and have absolutely no clue how idiotic they look.
A Few Old Ladies
What a callous remark! Thanks to the insensitivity of public characters like yourself "old ladies" mean zero. In our extremely fragile economic situation the elderly are relegated to less importance than the family dog. Very likely those "old ladies" are too poor or overlooked by family or social services to hope for such a high-tech luxury as TV.
You and your loved ones are walking down the same path. As fortunes rise and fall, you may well end the same way unless you use your public position to raise societal awareness of the economic invitation to tragedy that beckons to all us travelers whether we feel as smug as yourself or not.
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