Advertisement

News

“Like” it or not

Facebook’s suite of new features is making the Web way more personal. Like inside-your-underpants personal. And, personally, I’m uncomfortable with it.

[rssbreak]

For instance, the default setting on Facebook has been reset so that partner sites – Yelp, Pandora and others – have access to personal info like your date of birth, sex, name and email address. And if you click one of the new Like buttons plastered across the Internet, your name gets attached for others to see.

So, directly after the F8 conference where Facebook CEO/baby genius Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes, I wrote a characteristically lucid takedown of the new features on the NOW website.

I called Zuckerberg’s race to conquer the Web Napoleonic, and labelled his goal of a more personalized Web, where sites know who you are as soon as you load their page, nothing less than Orwellian. It was pretty terrific you should read it.

Yet the next day, I giddily installed all the new Facebook Like buttons, the newly adjusted fan widget and a couple of social plug-ins on NOW’s site. So right next to my damnation of the new Like button, there was a Like button.

Pretty rich, if you ask me. Flip-flopping like a fish out of water.

But can you blame me?

Facebook has a stranglehold on the Internet, and even more so now.

It has more than 400 million users worldwide, and 500 million people visit the site every month. The new Like buttons are getting clicked by the billions.

And publishers like NOW rush to reconfigure their sites to accommodate all Facebook’s new features, however horrible those are. Facebook, “Like” it or not, is a behemoth. It’s simply too big to ignore.

The fact that the privately held Facebook is attempting to take over the Web should not be surprising.

One of its board members and the venture capitalist who helped Zuckerberg get the social network site off the ground is billionaire Reaganite neo-conservative Peter Thiel.

From day one, Thiel’s been looking to reshape the world into a right-wing, tax-free paradise. And he’s aggressive about it – the type of guy who flips over chessboards mid-game when he starts losing.

How can you compete against that?

You can deactivate your account (“Facebook suicide,” I’ve heard it called). But you’d have to be pretty self-important to think that makes any difference.

You can complain. Like four U.S. Senators, including Minnesota’s Al Franken, who this week sent a letter to Zuckerberg and Facebook asking for clearer privacy controls.

But, alas, neither is the solution. Facebook is now unstoppable.

The only way to keep this social networking monolith from ruling the Internet is by embracing a handful of new competing social networks. Use Twitter. Try Gowalla. Maybe revive that Classmates.com profile. Maybe start up another social network. The point is, Facebook needs competition.

Here’s Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: “Microsoft’s Windows platform wasn’t threatened by user complaints, lawsuits or even government actions to weaken it. It took the evolution of the browser as an operating system, and new applications like Google Docs, to give users the comfort to move beyond Windows.”

The only way to end Facebook’s reign is, therefore, innovation.

joshuae@nowtoronto.com

twitter.com/joshuaerrett

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.