Now Danah Boyd's also said it.......

...maybe the kids will take notice. Danah Boyd called it about right on Facebook. She raises the same issues we have been raising over the last few months.

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

Damn good question.....its something we've also noticed over the years. If Microsoft or even Yahoo had tried all this they would have been howled all the way to the moon.

I'm also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they announced public search listings on Facebook. I'm utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people's FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you're findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize.

The reason this post delights us is that all this is plain as day to us, we''ve been banging on about Privacy issues on Social Nets for as long as this blog has been going, and Facebook's plays are quite worrying (see posts here, here, here and here for example) but clearly we are considered Web 1.0 Old Farts and thus just don't "Get It". Apart from having seen it all before, of course.....

But having someone from the Facebook generation call it will hopefully help...only today there are reports on the rapid rise of identity crime from people putting all their data on SocNets, and the lessons on socnet scrapers are there to be learned.

Postscript...Robert Scoble has issued a sort of rebuttal, one of the things he said rang true - when Danah asked “But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook.” he repiled:

Because there isn’t anything better. It’s like why we are so gaga over the iPhone. The iPhone is locked up tight and doesn’t let us play. But it is so superior to the alternatives that we’ll put up with all the walls.