For the record, I can’t stand FaceBook, and it has nothing to do with their new terms of service.

When I get a request on FaceBook to “buy your friends,” or the tons of other requests (mob wars, your cool, which celebrity, japanese food, thai food, own your friends, kidnap, relative, coffee, hugs, flowers, drinking, green patch, southern stuff, pumpkin …), I just ignore them. When you accept these you are giving an extraordinary amount of marketing data to Facebook and turn your friends into marketing subjects for virtually nothing in return.

Back in the day, these FaceBook requests stood around in the mall with a clip board, desparately craving validation from complete strangers. Most of us wisely ignored them. Now that they are on FaceBook, your friends can’t fill out enough of them without inviting you to the party.

Annoying.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful to know what your friend’s favorite song is at the moment, but I could care less finding out through a stupid application on FaceBook. These bits of information are what build friendships when they are learned in the shared context of real life, but they are rendered meaningless out of the context of real friendships. And despite what that chain email from 1994 convinced you, it’s not fun to fill out anything with 25 questions and then ask your friends to join you.

I’d rather paint a fence.

And you can kiss the days of venting about your co-workers goodbye. I can’t even complain about farting co-workers without the entire staff apologizing for what they thought I smelled.

It’s become quite a chore.

Suburban Turmoil

I thought then about my Facebook friend, and all we had gone through together in the last 12 hours. Generosity. Acceptance. Treachery. Murderous rage. Relief. Healing. Forgiveness.

Facebook and an ex-cheerleader healed my sore throat. They didn’t have to, but they did. And if that doesn’t warm your heart, then you, my friend, are a cold, hard mofo, and there’s no help for you.

NewsTechZilla

Let’s say 5 years from now Facebook is no longer viable as a business. Maybe advertising revenues can’t support the weight of the application, or maybe some cash heavy company (Microsoft, Google) launches a competitor with more features that cleans your keyboard or reads your thoughts. Now what is Facebook to do?

One out for them may be to sell this huge database of information they now own. It contains lots of information that is extremely valuable, like matches of real names and photos to email addresses, relationships with other email addresses, names, photos, etc. Wouldn’t this be a great option for investors looking to cash in on their investment and walk away?

Tiny Cat Pants

If you’re interested in how Facebook is doing you wrong, Rana’s got a great explanation. The best part, though, is how she reveals that, in order to have discovered that, by using Facebook after the TOS changed, you had to have used Facebook after the TOS had changed and thus, in discovering the change, you implicitly and accidentally agreed to it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Gatherings, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.