I may spend a lot of time on Facebook and I think it’s a great way to keep in touch with people but quite honestly, I don’t trust Facebook…at all.
I don’t want Facebook everywhere on the web and I don’t trust Facebook with this much of my information because I don’t know what they’ll use it for. It’s one thing to have my photos, and my status updates but the more Facebook extends into my browsing habits on the entire web, the more I begin to feel invaded. The same argument could be made for Google but I feel like I have a better sense of their motives. Google wants to organize all of the world’s information. I am fairly certain that Google will use my information to build a profile of what contextual ads they can serve to me and collect data to make my search experience more accurate; I have no idea what Facebook will do with my information.
Facebook also changes the game up on us. Remember when Facebook was like an “inner circle” sort of thing? Twitter was open, Facebook was closed. I liked it that way. It worked. Then Zuckerberg states that “public is the new social norm.” I don’t like that. I saw Facebook as a place where people interact and network with people they know, we felt safe-ish and that’s what we like about it. Public is for Twitter or Facebook if you choose. The problem is that Facebook is now Public by default and the tech-illiterate, which makes up the majority of Facebook doesn’t know any better.
Another thing, Facebook, like Microsoft, is anti-competitive. Facebook hears about something happening on the social web and all of a sudden that’s the next project on their roadmap. Much like Microsoft, they don’t do it as well either. When Facebook tried to encourage everyone to go public, they did it to take on Twitter, more appropriately, to kill Twitter. Much like Microsoft, Facebook is a big enough company that it often doesn’t matter if their product isn’t as good. Once Facebook starts offering Geo-Location check-ins, numerous geo-location start-ups will either integrate with Facebook, get acquired by Facebook or fold. I don’t want Facebook doing anything and everything. I want Facebook to be the Facebook from 2008. I like my Twitter and my Foursquare. I don’t need my dishwasher to be a blender and a microwave too.