Lately I’ve been taking a break from this blog to work on my musician stuff. I’ve been sort of living under a rock as far as tech news goes. Normally, I would be reading into just about anything that even remotely interests me in the tech world, but lately I’ve just been too busy living in my own head to really find out what is going on beyond the twitter posts. That was until I posted a snarky comment about people bitching about facebook privacy settings. Call it crying wolf, but all the past bitching about changes to the UI and petty crap on facebook sort of de-sensitized me to the latest real issue. If you don’t know what issue I’m talking about, check out the twitter account, and soon-to-be website that @AlanaJoy has propped up: http://twitter.com/FacebookProtest.

This is total bullshit. I hate facebook for a number of reasons at this point. Most of them are petty, but among them are the flood of useless apps that are allowed to run amok (sheds an interesting light on Apple’s “closed” platforms doesn’t it?) and the horrible UI choices that were made in place of well thought out and visually pleasing concepts from people outside of facebook (see: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook-design/).

Privacy, on the other hand, has never been something that really mattered all that much to me on facebook. I’ve been using it since around 2004 when I started school at Berklee College of commercialized dribble (music) and it was college only. Moving away from the college students only crowd was something I was hugely pissed about, but it was a trivial thing and I went about my business. Later, they almost lost me again when they introduced apps. Not because I don’t think they should allow apps, but because this is a NETWORKING site and not a place to digitally diddle yourself using apps that promote narcissistic endeavors and games that are pretty much life-sucking time vampires. Don’t you think the apps for a tool (yes, kids, a tool. Not a toy) like Facebook should be productive and collaborative as opposed to well..stupid? Like, say.. if google wave and buzz, instead of being a separate and therefor mostly useless entity, were built into your networks of friends for idea sharing and concept building? Wouldn’t that be a powerful tool in social networking for startups and creatives? Sorry. I Digress…

My point- I’m getting to it.

My point is that until recently, when I added family to my Facebook friends, I never touched privacy settings. The concept of finding privacy on the internet seemed like finding a music connoisseur at a Nickelback show. Sure they might make the claim, but do you really believe them? I mean come on. Ok, so that was a bad analogy, but I’m sure you kinda see what I’m scratching at.

So before you grab your pitchforks and go overboard, put a few things in perspective. Consider the fact that to a degree, sharing demographic info could be a good thing. Specially catered ads could make the ads one hell of a lot less annoying and introduce you to some really cool things. The controversy doesn’t lie so much in the concept of the privacy changes, it lies in the way that they are obscuring the opt-in/opt-out switch. Is this whole issue just exposing the glaring issues in Facebook’s usability? Is it malicious or is it just that we never noticed how awful the usability in such a widely used platform is? Shouldn’t Facebook be equal to the ease of use in an iPhone? My mom or dad would know basically how to use an iPhone, but need me to really sit with them and break down exactly how Facebook functions.

So, before I fall asleep, I submit this to you- Are we Fox News-ing this issue? Are we fear mongering about privacy issues that never really bothered us that much before or are we just finally fed up with Facebook’s convoluted layout? Which are you going to push for/bitch about this time- A new layout or a new feature? Keep in mind that I’m not condoning the things that facebook is trying to do. I’m just taking a step back and trying to figure out what this means to us and the future of social networking.

Regardless, thanks to @AlanaJoy for bringing the deeper issue to my attention.

(I’ll admit that I could be way off on this. I’d like you to explain what I’m missing. Also, I’m sure this is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors so go easy on me. I told you I was tired.)

Hey guys-

Obviously it’s been a while since I posted anything. Thought I’d let you know that I’ve sort of put this blog on hold until I’m done making this record I started working on last week. It’s one of those “I have to do this now and I’m not going to stop until it’s done” things. I do intend to get back to reblogging and posting computery bits and bobs eventually. I just have wanted to make something like this record for a while and I see my chance to get it done and be happy with it. If you’re interested, click over to “Magnets” and check it out. I’ll be posting changes, updates and related stuff as I add tracks to my small set of stupid songs. As always, I’m on twitter as @forbetaorworse. Thanks for following! -B