american.apparel.wears.facebook.

nobody@vox.com(.tiff) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:21:03 -0700

By pure coincidence I was checking out the Facebook Developors Wiki when Chico sent me the link to a new hoodie he just bought from American Apparel, and lo and behold there seem to be some pretty parallel color schemes going on here. A poppy red, a mustard yellow, and one two many shades of blue-ish gray-ish blue-gray. Very. Curious.

It wouldn't be too much of a surprise if Facebook picked up some color inspiration from American Apparel as there's a store a mere two blocks away from their Palo Alto office, but an even more delightful consideration is that Dov Charney sees the future of fashion through Web 2.0-colored glasses.

blue-ish grey-ish blue-grey

color me facebook

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crafty.vox.advertisement.in.presentation.

nobody@vox.com(.tiff) — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:27:37 -0800

Y'all know how much I heart Vox, big time. Since I am doing a presentation on Facebook and Web 2.0, I craftily incorporated a little Vox into my presentation. Muahahaha.

web 2.0 powerpoint

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facebook.not.as.private.as.it.seems.

nobody@vox.com(.tiff) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:50:01 -0700

This is a very long post. For more direct information on what the title suggests, scroll down to where the photo is...

For those of us who are well imbedded into the online community that is the Facebook, we have been well aware of some of the major changes that they've made. Recently the Facebook introduced the live feed interface which caused an immediate uproar in the community, causing many users to react forcefully by creating reactionary groups and feedback messages demanding to change the Facebook back to its original form

For those of you who are not familiar with the controversial update, Facebook changed the home page so that you could see anything any of your friends were doing, whether they recently made friends with someone, added some more photos, broke up with their significant other, or even removed an item from their profile. While this information overload seemed jarring and in a way frightening to know that all of our movements on Facebook could be monitored and displayed in such a fashion, I think many people overlooked the fact that the managers of Facebook had access to all of this information and surveillance before it was publically displayed. Because of all angry dispute between users, Facebook added the option to prevent your actions from being publicly displayed to your friends and networks, returning the general sense of privacy to the Facebook community and settling its users' fury for the time being.

Changes are rapidly occuring at Facebook, most likely because of the competitive atmosphere that is the Web 2.0 environment. Before the 'live feed' introduction, Facebook allowed persons with work e-mails to have an account within their work network, something that was never publically announced to Facebook users as was in the case of the Highschool network expansion. Now there is talk of Facebook's next step, opening its community to anyone within a certain area. This means that anybody willl be able to sign up for Facebook, regardless of whether they have an academic e-mail address or a work e-mail address. Clearly this is a movement towards meeting the same open access standards as the unfortunately popular MySpace, however this will open the dynamic of Facebook to trolls and persons we've never seen before. It will be easier for persons to assume false identities, and the ideal of a closed community in which you could ground your connections between real life affiliates will drastically change.

Now to the title of this post. After having lunch with a friend and discussing these changes, he noted to me that underneath the privacy preferences is the following option:

Picture 1

This option is located at the very bottom of the privacy preference page, underneath the 'Privacy Settings for Everyone'. The checked checkbox, while seeming readily harmless, allows the following according to the Facebook's terms of service:

Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your "About Me" section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, an encrypted user ID associated with your significant other's Facebook Site profile, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on Wall ™, a list of encrypted user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.

Perhaps I was naiive before or perhaps Facebook has changed their terms of service over the course of three years, but I was under the general impression that my information on facebook was private and not distributed. Facebook has always been an ideal online community in my mind because of the privacy options and standards, and because of the ability to create a comfortable online supplement to my real life encounters. The upsetting factor is this box is checked under the default, meaning all those who don't take the time to look into the terms in services (which I'm sure is the majority of users) will give free access to all of the above material.

I promptly unchecked my box, and seriously considered leaving Facebook. I think it is unfortunate that they find the need to change and alter the facebook environment, but I suppose thats the way things are these days. Regardless, they should be more open about their policies and changes instead of displaying half of the story. I feel in a way, I've been partially betrayed by Facebook and am interested in seeing what other changes they have in store that will deter me from being part of their community.

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