asciidan || news :: rants :: commentary

It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.

Let’s break it down:

Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.

We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.

That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.

On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.

I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.

Drop the Kool-Aid and run.

Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.

By the time you read this, I’m hoping to have fewer Twitter followers.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed you over to Atomic Tango, and Freddy’s wonderful tongue-in-cheek post about scoring more Twitter followers. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. It’s one of the truest, funniest and most interesting things I’ve ever read about Twitter.

It was funny at the time, and it made sense, but I wanted to put Freddy to the test. See, his contention is that you score more Twitter followers by doing slimy little things…and really, you do them to accomplish one slimy big thing — amass scores of fake Twitter followers so you can, well, brag about how many Twitter followers you have. And then get more Twitter followers.

Step one, according to Freddy: Keywords. Use enough of the right ones, and you draw the attention of Twitter zombies and spammers. The right keywords? Things like “MLM,” “network marketing,” “downline,” and “wealth.” And you can throw in SEO, SMM, SEM and any other buzzword used by the slimiest spammers on the net.

So I tried it out. I posted one simple tweet, packing it with keywords. I was in my office at the time, it was the end of the day, and I was headed home. Between posting that tweet and getting into my car, I gained seven new followers. On the drive home, I gained three more. Over the next couple of days, I posted five more tweets, packing each with keywords. I’ll add here that none of the tweets could have been construed as serious. In fact, I was brazen about calling out “my zombie friends” to make sure the follow process was automated. In short order I picked up about 60 new followers. I say “about” because I screwed up at first, and didn’t follow the zombies back. Those I didn’t follow dumped me within 24 hours. Lesson learned.

Those I did follow sent me automated direct messages almost immediately, offering to sell something. Awesome.

Then I realized what I had done. I ruined Twitter.

Now my stream is polluted with SEO experts, get-rich-quick schemes, automated tweets about blog posts from months ago and lots of ways I can use the Law of Attraction to make my life better. I don’t need Twitter for that; I already have an e-mail account.

Before this little experiment, Twitter was a pretty good news feed. I follow news outlets, tech journalists, local people and folks I consider experts (not people who call themselves experts) in fields that interest me. Sure, I’ve built a couple of lists to pull them from the haystack I created, but that just didn’t work for me.

So now I’m going to tell you the real secret of Twitter: Follower counts don’t mean anything. Nothing.?The only folks who have a lot of followers are celebrities and liars. That’s it. Why? Because everyone on Twitter believes they’re a leader; nobody wants to be a follower. We’re obsessed with our own follower counts because, well, what’s the sense in posting anything at all if there are only three people listening?

The sense is here: If you use the methods above and score 97 more followers than the three you used to have, there are still only three people listening. Zombies can’t hear you and won’t respond.

Want to get the most out of Twitter? Stop thinking about who’s following you and start concentrating on who you follow. There are brilliant people (like Freddy) posting brilliant things. And don’t worry about whether they’re following you back; follow them because you’re interested.

You get the most out of Twitter not by talking, but by listening. And if you’ve got engaging content to put up, do it. Talk to your followers. Respond to those you follow. Have a conversation. But don’t do any of it for the numbers. That’s the secret.

So…

I’m headed over to my Twitter account. And I’m unfollowing all the spammers, zombies and slimeballs.

I’m better company than that.

I don’t visit Chat Roulette. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. I don’t go there. The mere thought terrifies me. It shouldn’t — after all, I’m a grown man. But there are some things I’d just rather not see.

Chat Roulette is a pretty brilliant idea, actually. It’s one of those ideas that could only have been dreamed up by an idealistic teenager, who just wondered what it would be like if you could just hit a button and video chat with a random stranger anywhere in the world. Pretty awesome, right?

Wrong.

Like way too many other things online, creeps are immediately drawn in. And just to be clear, Internet perverts will always find a way to ruin any good idea. Always.

In the Chat Roulette I envision, a schoolteacher could put the service up on the projector in front of the class, hit a button and be connected to someone in Germany or France. The kids could ask questions about the chatter’s traditions or the food. They could actually learn something. It would be like when I was a youngster and we had penpals in other countries, only Chat Roulette would allow users to speak in real-time. I could even see classrooms using this daily — like a daily trip around the world. And even average Joes could go online and chat with random strangers, either for fun or to learn. It my vision, Chat Roulette could play a huge part in drawing the world closer together, breaking down borders and fostering understanding between people.

Instead, we get perverts.

C-NET’s Natali Del Conte, in a report for CBS, showed it doesn’t take but a couple of mouse clicks before a Chat Roulette visitor is exposed to nudity or propositioned for sex. And, as such, it’s not a safe playground.

I don’t know what the 17-year-old Russian lad who invented Chat Roulette had in mind when he launched the site a few short months ago. According the rules, there’s no pornography, nudity, illegal or immoral behavior allowed.  But as Jon Stewart points out, this is the Internet.

Point is, the Internet’s never seen a good idea it couldn’t screw up. And Chat Roulette was ruined before it ever got off the ground. My advice to the Chat Roulette developers? Figure out a content filter that allows safe surfing, and you’ll find your user numbers grow. Legitimize your site before it gets any more out of hand than it already is, and perhaps create an education-only section, where school kids can interact with each other in the classroom.

Right now, all you’ve got is a website that proves people suck.