DISQUS

think27: Facebook owns /me online and I hate it. What can we do?

  • Juan Sequeda · 1 year ago
    I bought my last name domain: sequeda.com. So soon I will be

    juan.sequeda.com/facebook
    juan.sequeda.com/twitter
    juan.sequeda.com/linkedin
    juan.sequeda.com/utexas
    ....

    This was your idea... and it's awesome!!
  • gochi · 11 months ago
    Hi juan launch your all sub domains i will be part of your network too.

    Thanks
  • David J. Neff · 1 year ago
    I bought daveiam.com and use that for a ton of stuff. Excellent points. And if you want less single ads try doing this:

    "Rumors of my recent relationship status change have been greatly exaggerated. Facebook doesn't do very good on the null logic, it just notices something has happened and gets excited. I am curious if I will stop being insulted with ads for HOT CHRISTIAN WOMEN now that my social networking profile is no longer "Single" even if I am. Not that I have anything against hot Christian women, but those ads /are/ somewhat distracting and they make me want to go to church for all the wrong reasons. I am playing it safe and staying home to look at Facebook."

    - Gregory Foster

    Or maybe you need to pay Facebook dude. They are providing you all this for FREE.
  • Todd Sundsted · 1 year ago
    John, I think this is exactly the kind of thinking we need. Consider this, in spite of lifelong continued pressure to "keep a journal", blah blah blah, I've never made as complete a record of my life as I have since I started using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Right now, the people using these systems are creating an invaluable record of their life and our time, for their descendants and for the future. But it's all locked away in Facebook's database, Twitter's database, Flickr's database, Google's database, etc. At some level this is okay. Google runs a tight IT organization. But what a huge point of failure. And consider the reaction people had toward Flickr/Yahoo when Microsoft started thinking about acquiring. This information needs to be portable, transportable, and in our control. I realize this kind of cuts the nuts off the "competitive/incumbent advantage" of sites like Facebook and many a VCs plans for monetizing social plays like these... but tough!

    - Todd (AKA Bandit)
  • Daniel Hope · 1 year ago
    Excellent point, I was inspired by what Chris St. John was saying the other night about Tessera ( http://tinyurl.com/3sp6pl ) and how it opens things up in SNs the way Facebook won't.
    It doesn't give us any control over that Facebook info though.
  • Vincent Gable · 1 year ago
    Here is a supporting essay, but it deals more with our "data shadow", and less with our identity:
    http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/o...
  • Vladislav Chernyshov · 1 year ago
    John! Very nice post! I love your idea about custom domain names. I think I will utilize this in the project I'm working on.

    Your post helped me to make summary of burning problems of social networking. You can read it here on my blog:
    http://tinyurl.com/3me6c3

    Take care,
    Vlad.