accuracy
18-02-2009, 09:00 AM
I came across these articles at Jeff Renses site and googled this forum,
and all the results ended up at the have a laugh section, this is why i'm posting
here.
This is NOTHING personal against any user of Facebook, i just wasn't sure
where to start the thread.
accuracy.;)
accuracy
18-02-2009, 09:07 AM
With friends like these ...
TOM HODGKINSON :LAST UPDATED Feb 18 2009
I despise Facebook. This hugely successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But why would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us since, instead of doing something enjoyable with my friends, I am sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend recently told me he spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook isolates us at our workstations.
Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us. If I put up a flattering picture with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.")
It also encourages a disturbing competitiveness around friendship: it seems with friends today, quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."
It seems I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59-million active users. That's 59-million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Two million new people join each week. At this rate Facebook will have more than 200-million active users this time next year.
Facebook is a well-funded project and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they hope to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. It is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. National boundaries are a thing of the past.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher, Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners.
Thiel invested $500 000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz met him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% which, at Facebook's current valuation of $15-billion, is worth more than $1-billion.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and chief executive of the virtual banking system, PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1,5-billion, taking $55-million for himself. He also runs a £3-billion hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management, and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country". He has made money betting on rising oil prices and correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken.
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford.
While at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal called The Stanford Review -- motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). He is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel describes himself "way libertarian".
TheVanguard is run by Rod Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses."
Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairperson's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."
Thiel says PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction.
Clearly, Facebook is another über-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries -- and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing. It just mediates in relationships that were happening already.
Thiel's philosophical mentor is René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection.
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens and claims that 40% of the world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack.
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer. To this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3,5-million to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
From its fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place. It is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook.
Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
Jeremy Breyer, the third board member of Facebook, is a partner in venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12,7-million into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of US giants Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is a former chairperson of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in the US, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like.
Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, which put in the sum of $27,5-million. One of Greylock's senior partners is Howard Cox, another former chair of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel, which is, believe it or not, the Âventure-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11 the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver solutions to the CIA and the broader US intelligence community to further their missions".
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier.
In-Q-Tel's first chair was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and -- with Breyer -- board member of BBN Technologies.
Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is mega-genius. Some net nerds suggest its $15-billion valuation is excessive, but I would argue that, if anything, it is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying and its growth potential limitless.
"We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I'll bet they do. It is Facebook's enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1,6% for $240-million. A recent rumour says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth-richest man in the world, has bought 0,4% of Facebook for $60-million.
The creators of the site need do little bar fiddle with the programme. Mostly they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photos and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web".
On November 6 last year Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast.
"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.
Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newsÂpaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your way.
It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46 000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. He wrote that the system has changed from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten.
Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will soon exceed the UK's? Thiel et al have created their own country, a country of consumers.
Now, you might find this social experiment tremendously exciting. Yes, and you might decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money and certainly you'll be waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.
Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this heavily funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands. You might decide that you don't want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.
For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard?
I don't want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking. -- © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2008
‘Facebook fatigue' sets in
British internet users are falling out of love with Facebook and the social networking site has shed 400 000 visitors between December and January, the website's first decline in users, writes Richard Wray.
Facebook remains the United Kingdom's most popular social networking site with 8,5-million unique users at the end of January, according to new figures from Nielsen Online. But that is down from 8,9-million in December.
Users are beginning to suffer "Facebook fatigue", according to Nielsen's European internet analyst Alex Burmaster. Having joined over the past year and spent hours finding and adding friends to their profiles, users are finding that the sheer amount of trivial information their contacts create is a turn-off.
"A lot of people who jumped on to Facebook over the past year and built up their friends and used applications are tiring of it," he said. "The aura has worn off a bit."
Nielsen started collecting data about Facebook in July 2006. "The figures for the numbers accessing Facebook at work have dipped slightly," Burmaster said. "After 17 successive months of growth there had to be a more general dip at some point.
"Everyone knew that social networking sites could not keep growing to the extent they had been, but I think it really is significant that that point is now being reached. This year we are likely to see a plateauing of social networking."
Facebook's audience is still 712% higher than it was a year ago and 9% higher than three months ago, but there is a growing sense in the online world that the hype around the company has been overdone and the honeymoon is over.
Faced with a barrage of information when they log on to Facebook, web surfers are choosing to join more niche websites instead. These sites are based around particular interests such as music or aimed more at business users who need to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts around the world.
"These are the sites that will see the strong growth over the coming year," Burmaster said. "They will not hit the heady heights of Facebook's audience but they have a very engaged audience which is attractive to advertisers.". -- © Guardian News & Media 2008
Facebook's privacy policy
Just for fun, try substituting the words "Big Brother" whenever you read the word "Facebook"
1. We will advertise at you
"When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features."
2. You can't delete anything
"When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information."
3. Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions
"... we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content."
4. Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable
"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience."
5. Opting out doesn't mean opting out
"Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications."
6. The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it
"By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States ... We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies." -- © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2008
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-02-29-with-friends-like-these
accuracy
18-02-2009, 09:14 AM
Why Facebook is growing wrinkles
Older users are jumping on the social networking bandwagon as if their lives depended on it - and in some cases, they do.
By Adrian Michaels
Last Updated: 7:08PM GMT 17 Feb 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01298/Facebook_1298548c.jpg
Silver surfer: going online is now a personal and professional necessity Photo: GETTY
John Prescott may have turned 70, but in online terms he is wearing unlaced trainers and jeans so low that his underpants are showing.
The former deputy prime minister has become a prolific blogger, and has joined millions of other users of Facebook in telling everyone 25 random facts about himself (an exercise repeated, at slightly shorter length, by some of our writers). Among the most riveting: he was born in Wales and he has used a "battle bus" in three elections. He is also on Twitter, a site used for sending brief alerts about what you have read or seen or are thinking: "Just been down the gym," he typed on the last day of January at 9.46am.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn. What these websites have in common, apart from a certain confusion about when to use capital letters, is that they have suddenly been embraced by older people. All over the world, youngsters have been alarmed to find themselves joined by hundreds of thousands of their clumsy elders, who had managed to resist social networking during its first few years.
In the US Congress, politicians have been updating their followers on Twitter with unmissable minute-by-minute accounts of negotiations over the fiscal stimulus package. "Getting emotional in here," a breathless Jason Chaffetz from Utah remarked last week. His Republican colleague Pete Hoekstra reported, via his BlackBerry, that he had just landed on an official mission to Baghdad – assuming, no doubt, that insurgents don't have internet access.
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, is also on Twitter. He has boasted about being the official coin tosser at the start of a cricket match, and also announced that he was joining a minute's "silence" on Twitter to commemorate those killed in the recent bush fires. I'm very sorry about the people who died, too: but I'm not sure that desisting from telling others that you have flipped coins or gone to the gym is the best possible tribute.
You might think that this rush online is about old people trying to be trendy – but I think it's actually being driven by fear. Those over 35 are worried that the internet has at last spawned something they cannot afford to ignore, and through which many in society will in future receive their cues. Jobs and events will only be advertised online, just as vital conversations will only take place there. Opportunities will pass you by while you stand in black and white in your hallway saying: "Operator, get me Mayfair one-two-one-two."
To an extent, this is already happening. The other week, a friend in London organised a party by sending invitations only through Facebook. Those who don't organise their social life via computer were in danger of missing it.
When I turned up – fully expecting my friend to be turning 40 in the company of five short-sighted workaholics in an empty bar – I learned that Facebook is now an essential weapon for the single man. Gone, said the host, are the days of plucking up the courage to ask for someone's telephone number; most people can now be found online and asked, as a prelude to a first date, to join a list of your virtual "friends". As such, you can exchange messages, pictures and jokes, just as if you actually liked one another.
But Facebook and other sites are not useful just for socially adolescent 40-year-olds. Recruiters, law enforcement officers and journalists have learnt the value of checking for personal information online. Equally, those looking for work know that they will be checked out, and increasingly feel the need to prove their popularity by having large online networks of social and work contacts.
"It's less the desire to be connected to the younger generation, and more the pressure of my peer group," says a management consultant in San Francisco. "Of course, it does no harm that I raised my hand as a Facebooker in a management meeting the other day, and that I was one of only about half of the folks there who did so."
LinkedIn, which is styled deliberately as a tool for professional networking, is being used intelligently by some to get ahead of the pack. A software developer from Cambridge says that his company has been gaining an insight into small, non-public companies by searching for their employees: those that have a profusion of "account managers" rather than "developers" might be trying harder to target large companies. The firm has also set up accounts on Twitter for its various products, allowing users and prospective purchasers to ask questions and post observations. "Twitter's just an additional tool to help us become a familiar name in the software world," he told me – via email, of course.
Such creativity suggests that the sensible course of action might be to embrace networking sites for professional purposes, and leave the socialising to younger generations.
One senior executive working in New Jersey felt he had to join Facebook because he was missing out on announcements of births, deaths and marriages. Now he has changed his mind: "I realised that by not being on Facebook, I was actually being spared the plethora of post-birthing photos and discussion that used to do the rounds on email.
"In recent years, these had been accompanied by an increasing number of photos, and it was only a matter of time before we had someone rig up an ankle-cam… If I don't have to suffer it by not being on Facebook, that's a good thing."
And if you are determined never to face Facebook, salvation may emerge from the global recession. Facebook, Twitter and the rest may have attracted millions of users – but they have still not found a way to earn money from their huge online communities.
News emerged last week that Facebook had been valued in an American court case at $4 billion as of June, down from an incredible $15 billion in 2007. Since then, it could well have fallen further. Twitter, meanwhile, raised some funding last week, but has admitted that it would be good to start "building revenue-generating products".
It will just be too bad if it fails. I, for one, am not quite ready to start subsidising announcements about John Prescott's workout schedule.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/4682433/Why-Facebook-is-growing-wrinkles.html
alzee
18-02-2009, 09:55 AM
I'm a Facebook user, and am very happy being one.
I don't use my real name and I couldn't care less if FB has access to my "consumer preferences", although I struggle to imagine exactly what consumer prefs theyre finding out about?!
I did leave FB very soon after joining, as lots of friends seemed to be obsessed with turning me into a Vampire or Werewolf :-s I'm now back and no longer use the wealth of silly applications that abound on FB and I'm much happier.
I do use FB to find and keep in touch with old or distant friends and family - I can't fault it for that superb service.
blondina1
18-02-2009, 10:28 AM
I use facebook and to be honest isn't it just like anything else we use. You make of it what you wish. You don't want ppl to know your real name, your 'consumer' issues, see your photos etc.. etc.. ok then don't use these applications. Facebook is not a forced thing, it is a tool to stay in touch with friends, family and aquaintances.
Btw, oh yes the vampire and werewolf applications were very annoying :rolleyes:
accuracy
19-02-2009, 08:17 AM
I'm a Facebook user, and am very happy being one.
I don't use my real name and I couldn't care less if FB has access to my "consumer preferences", although I struggle to imagine exactly what consumer prefs theyre finding out about?!
I did leave FB very soon after joining, as lots of friends seemed to be obsessed with turning me into a Vampire or Werewolf :-s I'm now back and no longer use the wealth of silly applications that abound on FB and I'm much happier.
I do use FB to find and keep in touch with old or distant friends and family - I can't fault it for that superb service.
I just recieved 2 emails ( out of 10 in my list) and they both asked me to sign up for sharing information.
I personally cannot be bothered with it, as being an old fart.:D
the nine
09-03-2009, 02:24 AM
They can only know what you put in. If you leave it vague then they will not know much about you.
youdont think they can trace your address?
if you joke, or are contacted by an old friend who is on the wathed list, then you too beacome watched..
you may think you can outsmart them marpat, but they have intelligence in abundance!
if they know your friends and family then they have an opening..