Facebook, Your New Platform Sucks
April 27th, 2010 | Categories: Online | 6 CommentsDear Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg/The Facebook Powers That Be,
I can see straight through your PR spin of “building the social web together” when the new Facebook platform was announced. I don’t need new ways for my online experience to be personalized, because essentially that’s just another tool to divulge more personal information about me and my dis/likes for everyone to see across the World Wide Web. I don’t even bother reading the stuff that my friends choose to “Like” on Facebook because more often than not it’s stupid stuff like “Why do I even miss you?” or “If you ask me to hold your drink, I will drink it”1. So why would I want to be privy to this kind of stuff all across the web? Do I really have to know what specific type of Levi’s jeans my friend chose to “like” on the Levi’s website? No, not really. If I really wanted to know, I could just, you know, do it the old school way and ask him or her instead.
I already have enough qualms about how addicted to Facebook my generation has become over the last few years and how much Facebook has permeated society and created various societal norms that are continually reinforced2. This is especially disconcerting when considering that much of Facebook’s recent changes to the platform eliminates previously established privacy settings. Despite Facebook’s claims to the contrary, Facebook is more public now than it ever was before and users need to check through each and every single setting under the “Privacy” tab of their account to make sure they’re not sharing private information with strangers.
I also have a problem with how this new “Instant Personalization Pilot Program” and how all users are automatically opted into sharing personal public information with third party websites such as Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp. Sure, public information is fair game, but when your relatively recent privacy changes affected which personal information became public, a lot of users are going to end up sharing information they thought was private. Even if I uncheck the box that says “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites” I’m told that my friends that participate in this personalization program can still share my public information. So then I have to individually block the applications for the third party websites involved in the personalization program to ensure that my personal information remains, well, personal. Even then I’m not sure I’ve wholly prevented third party websites from accessing my information.
I’m not the only one that thinks the new platform and the personalization program sucks. While I don’t realistically think Senators asking Facebook to reconsider the way they divulge user information to third party websites is going to do anything, it’s definitely a sign that something is amiss when it comes to Facebook’s new features.
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Hi, I'm Manda. I'm a college student studying communications and languages. I like to read, shop, bake, and travel. I have a tendency to listen to my favorite songs on repeat for hours on end. Sometimes I catch myself thinking in a language other than English. 
I totally agree that what they’re doing is really disturbing. Every time they start to roll new features out, I get suspicious because I know the shiny new things are just to distract you from the fact that they’re making it less private and probably harvesting more information from your profile.
Facebook sucks. End of story. I don’t even use it anymore.
Sad as it sounds, I don’t think I could ever stop using Facebook unless the majority of my friends did as well. So much stuff is covered on Facebook, socially speaking, that I’d be constantly out of the loop if I stopped using it anytime soon.
I’m glad that I’m so rarely on facebook that I didn’t know any of this was going on until now >< its retarded though… I hate how some of my friends have huuuge comment pages back and forth between each other, and i KNOW that they're texting/IMing each other at the same time?! It's all a freaking public show!
Amen. If we’re supposed to be careful online this is one sure way to make that not happen, especially when there are kids on Facebook, no matter what the age limit is. You’re now not allowed to have interests listed any more if you won’t link to the pages, so hearing about this new thing doesn’t surprise me.
I rarely use Facebook anymore. Your reply to Katy sums up what they’ve gone and cleverly done – people feel they have to rely on Facebook now because others don’t bother doing things the old way (events etc). That’s more for the company.
I never had my interests listed, so it doesn’t bother me on a personal level that interests must link to pages now (although obviously, the principle does bother me). But I removed myself as a fan of some Pages I was previously a fan of when there was no longer the option to make that private. I hate how things that used to be private are being made public, largely without any announcements by Facebook about the changes.