Epigrammatic :: facebook

While we're talking about Facebook, by the way, I've got a quick story (cross-posted here).

Facebook entirely deleted my interests this morning. I guess I wasn't moving fast enough for them in transitioning to the new interests-linked-to-Pages system, as I'd been clicking away from the transition page for a few days—'cause I'd been too busy to go through and basically curate a collection of links to Pages for things I'm interested in and/or opt out by copy-pasting my interests over to another field. I had a lot of little things on there—quotes, lists, etc.—and I was trying to decide what to do with it.

So this morning, I finally decided to sit down and deal with the transition—only to find that all of my carefully collected data in that field was gone, gone, gone.

The most ridiculous thing? My fiancé, because he never logs in to Facebook, still has all of his interests and other data completely intact. The system only deleted my data when I decided to comply with its electronic demands for an update.

So you know what? Fuck that shit. I'm still me and my interests are still my interests, but it really upset me to see a collection of data I'd been building on there since 2004 just wiped out.

Basically the only thing left on my profile now is the following:

"There's so much more to the Internet than this."

Edit: I managed to recover my interests list with the Give Me My Data app, per MetaFilter's jocelmeow. But don't think for a second I'll trust Facebook with it again...

1:34 pm, May 09, 2010 :: facebook

Via danah boyd's tweet here, found this draft thesis (PDF) by researcher Chris Peterson titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook.

It's all pretty spot-on, but of particular note to me so far, as it confirms some of my conjectures in this earlier post about the cultural differences between Facebook and Twitter, has been the section called "The Social Practices of Facebook." Writes Peterson:

Perhaps the most interesting (and potentially counterintuitive) fact about Facebook is that it is not a social networking site, but rather a social network site. In other words, Facebook is not about meeting new people but rather friending people whom one already knows. It is less like a Yellowpages than a Rolodex; less like a cocktail party than an evening in with friends; less like JigSaw and more like an AIM buddy list. Mayer and Puller found that only 0.4% of Facebook friendships consisted of “online only” interactions. danah boyd concurred, describing social network sites as malls for modern teens: spaces to socialize, “hang out,” to see and be seen, etc. The average number of Friends any given user has is 120, remarkably close to the famous Dunbar number in anthropology and sociology.

The implication of the “real relationships” phenomenon is that all Facebook interactions are animated and governed by preexisting social norms, roles, and expectations.

Exactly.

3:02 pm, June 30, 2009 :: facebook

ARCHIVES

TWITTER

LAST.FM