How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy

Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world's third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.

Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on one another, the company has joined the ranks of the Web's great superpowers. Microsoft made computers easy for everyone to use. Google helps us search out data. YouTube keeps us entertained. But Facebook has a huge advantage over those other sites: the emotional investment of its users. Facebook makes us smile, shudder, squeeze into photographs so we can see ourselves online later, fret when no one responds to our witty remarks, snicker over who got fat after high school, pause during weddings to update our relationship status to Married or codify a breakup by setting our status back to Single. (I'm glad we can still be friends, Elise.) (See pictures of Facebook's headquarters.)

Getting to the point where so many of us are comfortable living so much of our life on Facebook represents a tremendous cultural shift, particularly since 28% of the site's users are older than 34, Facebook's fastest-growing demographic. Facebook has changed our social DNA, making us more accustomed to openness. But the site is premised on a contradiction: Facebook is rich in intimate opportunities — you can celebrate your niece's first steps there and mourn the death of a close friend — but the company is making money because you are, on some level, broadcasting those moments online. The feelings you experience on Facebook are heartfelt; the data you're providing feeds a bottom line.

The willingness of Facebook's users to share and overshare — from descriptions of our bouts of food poisoning (gross) to our uncensored feelings about our bosses (not advisable) — is critical to its success. Thus far, the company's m.o. has been to press users to share more, then let up if too many of them complain. Because of this, Facebook keeps finding itself in the crosshairs of intense debates about privacy. It happened in 2007, when the default settings in an initiative called Facebook Beacon sent all your Facebook friends updates about purchases you made on certain third-party sites. Beacon caused an uproar among users — who were automatically enrolled — and occasioned a public apology from Zuckerberg. (See how to delete your Facebook profile.)

And it is happening again. To quell the latest concerns of users — and of elected officials in the U.S. and abroad — Facebook is getting ready to unveil enhanced privacy controls. The changes are coming on the heels of a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on May 5 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which takes issue with Facebook's frequent policy changes and tendency to design privacy controls that are, if not deceptive, less than intuitive. (Even a company spokesman got tripped up trying to explain to me why my co-worker has a shorter privacy-controls menu than I do.) The 38-page complaint asks the FTC to compel Facebook to clarify the privacy settings attached to each piece of information we post as well as what happens to that data after we share it.

Facebook is readjusting its privacy policy at a time when its stake in mining our personal preferences has never been greater. In April, it launched a major initiative called Open Graph, which lets Facebook users weigh in on what they like on the Web, from a story on TIME.com to a pair of jeans from Levi's. The logic is that if my friends recommend something, I'll be more inclined to like it too. And because Facebook has so many users — and because so many companies want to attract those users' eyeballs — Facebook is well positioned to display its members' preferences on any website, anywhere. Less than a month after Open Graph's rollout, more than 100,000 sites had integrated the technology. (See five Facebook no-nos for divorcing couples.)

"The mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected," Zuckerberg told me in early May. To him, expanding Facebook's function from enabling us to interact with people we like on the site to interacting with stuff our friends like on other sites is "a natural extension" of what the company has been doing.

In his keynote announcing Open Graph, Zuckerberg said, "We're building a Web where the default is social." But default settings are part of the reason Facebook is in the hot seat now. In the past, when Facebook changed its privacy controls, it tended to automatically set users' preferences to maximum exposure and then put the onus on us to go in and dial them back. In December, the company set the defaults for a lot of user information so that everyone — even non-Facebook members — could see such details as status updates and lists of friends and interests. Many of us scrambled for cover, restricting who gets to see what on our profile pages. But it's still nearly impossible to tease out how our data might be used in other places, such as Facebook applications or elsewhere on the Web. (See TIME's video on how people of all ages are connecting through Facebook.)

There's something unsettling about granting the world a front-row seat to all of our interests. But Zuckerberg is betting that it's not unsettling enough to enough people that we'll stop sharing all the big and small moments of our lives with the site. On the contrary, he's betting that there's almost no limit to what people will share and to how his company can benefit from it.

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Since the site expanded membership to high schoolers in 2005 and to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006, Facebook has become a kind of virtual pacemaker, setting the rhythms of our online lives, letting us ramp up both the silly socializing and the serious career networking. Zuckerberg's next goal is even more ambitious: to make Facebook a kind of second nervous system that's rapid-firing more of our thoughts and feelings over the Web. Or, to change the metaphor, Facebook wants to be not just a destination but the vehicle too.

"I'm CEO ... Bitch"
Facebook's world headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., looks like an afterthought, a drab office building at the end of a sleepy stretch of California Avenue. Lacking the scale of Microsoft's sprawling campus or the gleaming grandeur of Google HQ, Facebook's home base is unpretentious and underwhelming. The sign in front (colored red, not the company's trademark cobalt blue) features a large, boldface address with a tiny Facebook logo nestled above. (See 10 tech trends for 2010.)

Inside the building, Facebook crams in hundreds of employees, who work in big, open-air bullpens. Without cubicles or walls, there isn't much privacy, so each desk seems like, well, a Facebook profile — small, visible-to-all spaces decorated with photos and personal sundries. Zuckerberg spent the past year in a dimly lit bullpen on the ground floor. But perhaps in a concession to the fact that the CEO needs some privacy, the 26-year-old billionaire recently moved upstairs to a small office, albeit one with a glass wall so everyone can see what he's doing in there.

Steve Jobs has his signature black turtlenecks; Zuckerberg usually sports a hoodie. In Facebook's early years, he was the cocky coder kid with business cards that read, "I'm CEO ... Bitch." (Zuckerberg has said publicly they were a joke from a friend.) And elements of the Palo Alto headquarters — snack tables, Ping-Pong — still impart some semblance of that hacker-in-a-dorm-room feel. (See the top 10 Internet blunders.)

The office's design reflects Facebook's business model too. Openness is fundamental to everything the company does, from generating revenue to its latest plans to weave itself into the fabric of the Web. "Our core belief is that one of the most transformational things in this generation is that there will be more information available," Zuckerberg says. That idea has always been key to Facebook's growth. The company wants to expand the range of information you're sharing and get you to share a lot more of it. (Comment on this story.)

For this to happen, the 1,400 Facebook employees in Palo Alto and around the world (Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo, etc.) work toward two goals. The first is expansion, something the company has gotten prodigiously good at. The site had 117 million unique visitors in the U.S. in March, and the company says some 70% of its users are in other countries. In cellular-connected Japan, the company is focusing on the mobile app. In cricket-crazed India, Facebook snared fans by helping the Indian Premier League build a fan page on Facebook's site. (Watch TIME's video "I Look Like Whom?")

There's a technical aspect too. The slightest fraction of a second in how long it takes to load a Facebook page can make the difference between someone's logging in again or not, so the company keeps shaving down milliseconds to make sure you stay. It also mobilized Facebook users to volunteer to help translate the site into 70 languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu, to make each moment on Facebook feel local.

The Aha! Moment
Facebook did not invent social networking, but the company has fine-tuned it into a science. When a newcomer logs in, the experience is designed to generate something Facebook calls the aha! moment. This is an observable emotional connection, gleaned by videotaping the expressions of test users navigating the site for the first time. My mom, a Facebook holdout whose friends finally persuaded her to join last summer, probably had her aha! moment within a few minutes of signing up. Facebook sprang into action. First it asked to look through her e-mail address book to quickly find fellow Facebook users she knew. Then it let her choose which of these people she wanted to start getting short status updates from: Details about what a long-lost friend from high school just cooked for dinner. Photos of a co-worker's new baby. Or of me carousing on a Friday night. (No need to lecture, Mom.)

Facebook has developed a formula for the precise number of aha! moments a user must have before he or she is hooked. Company officials won't say exactly what that magic number is, but everything about the site is geared to reach it as quickly as possible. And if you ever try to leave Facebook, you get what I like to call the aha! moment's nasty sibling, the oh-no! moment, when Facebook tries to guilt-trip you with pictures of your friends who, the site warns, will "miss you" if you deactivate your account. (See what users say about Facebook.)

So far, at least, the site has avoided the digital exoduses that beset its predecessors, MySpace and Friendster. This is partly because Facebook is so good at making itself indispensable. Losing Facebook hurts. In 2008 my original Facebook account was shut down because I had created multiple Dan Fletchers using variants of the same e-mail address, a Facebook no-no but an ingenious way to expand my power in the Mob Wars game on Facebook's site. When Facebook cracked down and gave me and my fictional mafia the kiss of death, I lost all my photos, all my messages and all my status updates from my senior year of high school through the first two years of college. I still miss those digital mementos, and it's both comforting and maddening to know they likely still exist somewhere, sealed off in Facebook's archives.

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Being excommunicated from Facebook today would be even more painful. For many people, it's a second home. Users share more than 25 billion pieces of information with Facebook each month. They're adding photos — perhaps the most intimate information Facebook collects — at a rate of nearly 1 billion unique images a week. These pics range from cherished Christmas mornings to nights of partying we, uh, struggle to remember. And we're posting pictures not just of ourselves but also of our friends, and naming, or tagging, them in captions embedded in the images. Not happy someone posted an unflattering shot of you from junior high? Unless the photo is obscene or otherwise violates the site's terms of use, the most you can do is untag your name so people will have a harder time finding the picture (and making fun of you).

With 48 billion unique images, Facebook houses the world's largest photo collection. All that sharing happens on the site. But in two giant leaps, the company has made it so that users can register their opinions on other sites too. That first happened in 2008, when the company released a platform called Facebook Connect. This allows your profile to follow you around the Internet from site to site, acting as a kind of passport for the Web. Want to post a comment about this article on TIME.com? Instead of having to register specifically with that site, Facebook users just have to click one button. This idea of a single sign-on — a profile that obviates the need for multiple user names and passwords — is something a lot of other companies have attempted. But Facebook had the critical mass to make it work. (Become a fan of TIME on Facebook.)

Targeting Your Likes
Zuckerberg unveiled the second big initiative, Open Graph, this spring. It's a nerdy name for something that's surprisingly simple: letting other websites place a Facebook Like button next to pieces of content. The idea is to let Facebook users flag the content from as many Web pages as possible. For example, if I'm psyched about Iron Man 2, I can click the Like button for that movie on IMDB, and the film will automatically be filed under Movies on my Facebook profile. I can set my privacy controls so that my friends can find out in one of three ways that this is a movie I like. They can go to IMDB, where my charming profile picture will display on the page. They can get a status update about my liking this movie. Or they can see it on my Facebook profile.

Facebook wants you to get into the habit of clicking the Like button anytime you see it next to a piece of content you enjoy. Less than a month after launching Open Graph — which made its debut with some 30 content partners, including TIME.com — Facebook is quickly approaching the point where it will process 100 million unique clicks of a Like button each day. (See "The Downside of Friends: Facebook's Hacking Problem.")

The company's goal with Open Graph is to give you ways to discover both new content and more common ground with the people you're friends with. That's the social benefit Zuckerberg sees, and it's shared by those in his employ. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, is at her most enthusiastic when she's describing Peace.Facebook.com, part of the website that tracks the number of friendships made each day between members of groups that have historically disagreed, such as Israelis and Palestinians and Sunnis and Shi'ites. "We don't pretend Facebook's this profound all the time," Sandberg says. "But is it harder to shoot at someone who you've connected to personally? Yeah. Is it harder to hate when you've seen pictures of that person's kids? We think the answer is yes."

Helping bring about world peace would be nice, but Facebook is not a philanthropic organization. It's a business, and there's a tremendous business opportunity around Facebook's member data. And Sandberg knows it. She joined the company in 2008 after helping Google build its ad platform into a multibillion-dollar business. Much like Google, Facebook is free to users but makes a lot of money (some analysts estimate the privately held company will generate $1 billion in revenues in 2010) from its robust ad system. According to the Web-research firm comScore, Facebook flashed more than 176 billion banner ads at users in the first three months of this year — more than any other site. (See "Facebook Wants to Read Your Mind.")

The more updates Facebook gets you to share and the more preferences it entreats you to make public, the more data it's able to pool for advertisers. Google spearheaded targeted advertisements, but it knows what you're interested in only on the basis of what you query in its search engine and, if you have a Gmail account, what topics you're e-mailing about. Facebook is amassing a much more well-rounded picture. And having those Like buttons clicked 100 million times a day gives the company 100 million more data points to package and sell.

The result is that advertisers are able to target you on an even more granular level. For example, right now the ads popping up on my Facebook page are for Iron Man 2 games and no-fee apartments in New York City (I'm in a demographic that moves frequently); my mom is getting ads for in-store furniture sales (she's in a demographic that buys sofas).

This advertising platform is even more powerful now that the site can factor in your friends' preferences. If three of your friends click a Like button for, say, Domino's Pizza, you might soon find an ad on your Facebook page that has their names and a suggestion that maybe you should try Domino's too. Peer-pressure advertising! Sandberg and other Facebook execs understand the value of context in selling a product, and few contexts are more powerful than friendship. "Marketers have known this for a really long time. I'm much more likely to do something that's recommended by a friend," Sandberg says.

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As powerful as each piece of Facebook's strategy is, the company isn't forcing its users to drink the Kool-Aid. It's just serving up nice cold glasses, and we're gulping it down. The friends, the connections, the likes — those are all produced by us. Facebook is the ultimate enabler. It's enabling us to give it a cornucopia of information about ourselves. It's a brilliant model, and Facebook, through its skill at weaving the site into the fabric of modern life, has made it work better than anyone else.

What Voldemort Is to Harry Potter
Zuckerberg believes that most people want to share more about themselves online. He's almost paternalistic in describing the trend. "The way that people think about privacy is changing a bit," he says. "What people want isn't complete privacy. It isn't that they want secrecy. It's that they want control over what they share and what they don't." (See "Who Will Rule the New Internet?")

Unfortunately, Facebook has a shaky history of granting people that control. In November 2007, when the company tried to make its first foray into the broader Web, it rolled out Facebook Beacon, in which users were automatically signed up for a program that sent a notice to all their friends on Facebook if, say, they made a purchase on a third-party site, like movie tickets on Fandango. Initially, users couldn't opt out of the service altogether — they had to click No Thanks with each individual purchase. And, worse, investigations by security analysts found that even after users hit No Thanks, websites sent purchase details back to Facebook, which the company then deleted. Amid a torrent of complaints, Facebook quickly changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and by December 2007, the company gave users the option of turning off Beacon completely. Ask Zuckerberg and other executives about the program now, and you'll notice that Beacon has become to Facebook what Voldemort is to Harry Potter's world — the thing that shall not be named.

Facebook isn't the only company to have made a serious social-networking infraction. In February, Google apologized after the rollout of its Twitteresque Buzz application briefly revealed whom its users e-mailed and chatted with most, a move that alarmed, among others, political dissidents and cheating spouses. But at Facebook, the Beacon debacle didn't stop the company from pushing to make more information public. This winter, the company changed its privacy controls and made certain profile details public, including a user's name, profile photo, status updates and any college or professional networks. During the transition, Zuckerberg's private photos were briefly visible to all, including several pictures in which he looks, shall we say, overserved. He quickly altered his settings. (See "25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You on Facebook.")

In April, the site started giving third-party applications more access to user data. Apps like my beloved Mob Wars used to be allowed to keep your data for only 24 hours; now they can store your info indefinitely — unless you uninstall them. This spring, Facebook also launched something called Instant Personalization, which lets a few sites piggyback onto Facebook user data to create recommendation engines. Once again, as with Beacon, users were automatically enrolled.

With each set of changes to Facebook's evolving privacy policy, protest groups form and users spread warnings via status messages. In some cases, these outcries have been quite sizable. Zuckerberg points to 2006, when users protested the launch of Facebook's News Feed, a streaming compilation of your friends' status updates. Without much warning, tidbits that you used to have to seek out by going to an individual's profile page were suddenly being broadcast to everyone on that person's list of friends. "We only had 10 million users at the time, and 1 million were complaining," Zuckerberg says. "Now, to think that there wouldn't be a news feed is insane." He's right — protesting the existence of a news feed seems silly in hindsight; Twitter built its entire site around the news-feed concept. So give Zuckerberg some credit for prescience — and perseverance. "That's a big part of what we do, figuring out what the next things are that everyone wants to do and then bringing them along to get them there," he says. (See "Facebook Does an About-Face on Privacy.")

But corralling 500 million people is a lot harder than corralling 10 million. And some users are ready to pull the plug entirely. Searches for "how to delete Facebook" on Google have nearly doubled in volume since the start of this year.

The Web's Sketchy Big Brother
If Facebook wants to keep up the information revolution, then Zuckerberg needs to start talking more and make his case for an era of openness more transparently. Otherwise, Facebook will continue to be cast in the role of the Web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.

But amid all the angst, don't forget that we actually like to share. Yes, Facebook is a moneymaking venture. But after you talk to the company's key people, it's tough to doubt that they truly believe that sharing information is better than keeping secrets, that the world will be a better place if you persuade (or perhaps push) people to be more open. "Even with all the progress that we've made, I think we're much closer to the beginning than the end of the trend," Zuckerberg says.

Want to stop that trend? The onus, as always, is on you to pull your information. Starve the beast dead. None of Facebook's vision, be it for fostering peace and harmony or for generating ad revenue, is possible without our feeding in our thoughts and preferences. "The way that people decide whether they want to use something or not is whether they like the product or not," Zuckerberg says. Facebook is hoping that we're hooked. As for me? Time to see if the ex-girlfriend has added new photos.

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Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan

Image by Robert Sanzalone via Flickr

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Twitter is set to get a big boost in Japan, one of its biggest and fastest-growing markets, after the Japanese cellphone carrier Softbank on Tuesday announced new handsets designed to link to the microblogging site, part of a major effort by Softbank to get a piece of America’s tech savvy.

Twitter has taken off in a big way here in the past two years, fanned by media exposure and the use of the service by a flurry of celebrities: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama tweets frequently, as does the astronaut and national hero Soichi Noguchi, who tweets from the International Space Station.

The number of unique users in Japan surged from 521,000 in April 2009 to 7.52 million in March, a 15-fold increase, according to the technology ratings service Nielsen Online Japan. Figures show Twitter is fast catching up to Japan’s biggest social networking site, Mixi, which had about 10.8 million unique users in March. An analysis by Semiocast, based in Paris, in February found 14 percent of the millions of tweets per day worldwide are in Japanese.

Image by digitalbear via Flickr

Twitter’s reach in Japan — the percentage of Internet users who have used the service — is about 12.3 percent, higher than the service’s reach of 10.2 percent in the United States, according to Nielsen. The service trumps Facebook, another American social networking site that has made a foray into Japan, which only has about 1.4 million users in the country, or less than 1 percent of its global membership.

“Twitter has seen tremendous growth all around the world in the past year, but in particular we’ve seen outstanding growth in Japan,” Evan Williams, chief executive of Twitter, said via a live link from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco at a Softbank news conference here. “It’s become one of our biggest and most important countries.”

“We believe Twitter is poised for even greater growth given the tremendous usage of keitai in Japan, and because Twitter has always been focused on the mobile, cellphone experience,” Mr. Williams added, using the Japanese word for cellphone.

Softbank, Japan’s fastest-growing cellphone carrier, with about 22 million subscribers, has been pushing Twitter as a new way to get Japanese hooked on its mobile data services. Softbank, which is the sole carrier of the iPhone in Japan, also runs the country’s most popular search engine and biggest Internet provider, and recently won exclusive rights to bring the iPad to Japan.

Softbank’s founder and chief executive, Masayoshi Son, has been one of Twitter’s biggest fans, tweeting enthusiastically, posting frequent replies to questions from followers and urging all of Softbank’s employees to tweet. He uses Twitter even from his bathtub, he claimed, using an iPhone and a Ziploc bag.

“Twitter has changed my life, my lifestyle,” he said. Japan is in fact leapfrogging older sites like Facebook to register directly to Twitter. “That’s why it’s experiencing explosive growth here in Japan,” Mr. Son said.

The service has benefited from a certain kind of herd mentality in Japan.

“Whenever Twitter celebrities are introduced on TV, tens of thousands of Japanese start to use it,” said Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japan-based technology expert and author of three books on Twitter. In cities like Tokyo, where many people live alone and inviting friends over is rare, a lot of people may have been craving conversation partners they are now finding on Twitter, he said.

Another big factor is the compact nature of the Japanese script means 140 characters allows for more substantial and complex posts. The word “internationalization,” for example, takes up just 3 characters in Japanese.

But there are plenty of more mundane tweets, often reflecting the nation's love of cuisine. “Midnight ramen now,” read a recent post by the user @ico390, followed by a link to a picture of noodles snapped on a cellphone.

Softbank also has a 30 percent stake in the Silicon Valley video streaming site Ustream, a service Mr. Son said he hoped would encourage users to tweet links to videos as well as photos.

Usage is especially high among Japanese in their 20s and 30s, is concentrated in big cities and about 44 percent of all users have tweeted from their cellphones, according to a 2010 survey of 5,500 Japanese by the Tokyo-based Fujitsu Research Institute.

Computer users connect to Twitter for an average of 4.4 hours a day, while those who use handsets log in for 2.3 hours, according to a separate study of 10,500 users by Ascii Media Works.

Softbank’s Twitter widget, or embedded application, will display an icon on the welcome screen of 14 cellphones from Softbank that lets users jump directly to a customized Twitter site, according to Softbank. Many phones also come with touch panels, TV receivers, solar cells and waterproofing.

“We expect to start growing faster than ever here with increased awareness of Twitter,” said Kevin Thau, Twitter’s mobile platform director, visiting Japan for Softbank’s announcement. “People tend to explore when they get new phones. It’s great for discoverability,” he said. The official Twitter widget on Softbank, he said, is hopefully “the start of a trend around the world.”

The growth in Japan adds to the good news at Twitter, which said last month that it had 106 million registered users and was adding new users at the rate of 300,000 a day.

Twitter’s service in Japan has long led the way in a quest by the company to take advantage of its rapid growth for revenue. Since Twitter’s Japan site went online in April 2008, it has carried ads — something the U.S site did not have. Companies from Sony to Toyota have set up corporate Twitter accounts.

Last month, Twitter finally unveiled an advertising program in the United States that shows up when users search for keywords that advertisers have bought to link to their ads.

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Voices of Humans Fading from Cellphones

Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls - NYTimes.com

By JENNA WORTHAM

Liza Colburn uses her cellphone constantly.

She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.

“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.

For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.

For example, although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.

This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.

“Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. “But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.”

Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.

But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen.

Still, even the telephone design industry has taken note. Ross Rubin, a telecommunications analyst with the NPD Group, said cellphones outfitted with numerical keyboards — easiest for quickly dialing a phone number — were no longer in vogue. Touch screens, or quick messaging devices with full “qwerty” keyboards, on the other hand, are. On the newest phones, users must press several buttons or swipe through several screens to get to the application that allows them to make calls.

“Handset design has become far less cheek-friendly,” Mr. Rubin said. Mr. Hesse of Sprint said he expected that within the next couple of years, cellphone users would be charged by the data they used, not by their voice minutes, a prediction echoed by other industry executives.

When people do talk on their phones, their conversations are shorter; the average length of a local call was 1.81 minutes in 2009, compared with 2.27 minutes in 2008, according to CTIA. For some, the unused voice minutes mount up.

“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”

Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”

Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.

“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”

Nicole Wahl, a 35-year-old communications manager at the University of Toronto, estimates she talks on her phone only about 10 minutes a month.

“The only reason I ever call someone anymore is if I don’t have their Twitter handle or e-mail address,” Ms. Wahl said. “Like my hairdresser to see if she has a last-minute appointment or my parents to say I’m dropping by.”

American teenagers have been ahead of the curve for a while, turning their cellphones into texting machines; more than half of them send about 1,500 text messages each month, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates.

“We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,” she said.

Mrs. Colburn said texting had also become a much easier way to stay in touch with her daughter and receive quick updates about after-school plans.

“The other night she texted me from upstairs to ask a vocabulary question,” she said with a laugh. “But I drew the line there. I went upstairs to answer it.”

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Why I Left Facebook

Image via CrunchBase

by John MacDougall

I joined Facebook (FB) several years ago with simple aims. I wanted new, real-name private sources about Indonesia and Timor-Leste, subjects of two list projects I ran on Yahoo Groups. I was also frustrated about the limited options for private presentation of self (for myself and others) and direct communication on Friendster, then a key social networking player. For a while, FB managed to meet these needs to a partial degree which made it seem worth investment of my time.

This only occurred after a dismaying start, in which my account was quickly suspended, twice, for 'spam-like' activity (simply adding a few friends and posting a few links). FB's then spam detection robot was very amateurish. Finding relevant friends was hampered severely by a then requirement to join a single geographical network -- searching for friends outside was not permitted. (This lame attempt to create 'community' was later eliminated.) I did create several FB 'groups' akin to my Yahoo lists on Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Groups were open to all and adding members was all too easy -- friends on FB longer could simply invite all their friends to join a group. Through friending group members, I was slowly able to build my preferred network on FB, even though, as on Yahoo, few persons besides myself contributed to these 'groups.' On the other hand, I was besieged with requests to join 'fun' game applications.

In retrospect, I should have learned more from these early strange patterns which ultimately turned FB into the deeply flawed, dangerous and specious social networking site it has now unfortunately become.

1) The site owners and admins change the user interface capriciously and too frequently, often without announcement and without first ascertaining, through trials, user feedback. New users cannot possibly master the site even in a month and as a result wind up with settings they would not otherwise approve, even if they have the patience to locate and examine them. The link to the well-written help pages is so poorly placed that few know it exists. In any case, the help pages have grown to almost book-length size, a deterrent to their use.

2) The quality of the main programs which define and maintain the site is too often very poor, too slow, or too inclined to fail. Applications especially lose their original attractive simplicity as they monetize, and they sometimes simply are suddently drastically modified, abandoned or made to disappear. This includes even a major native FB app like the one controlling 'groups.' I had to re-write and adapt text for all the six groups I created and maintained on FB, an onerous task. Redundant and fad apps now are overwhelmingly numerous. It has become very hard to get enough friends to coordinate their apps.

3) On-site search of FB itself now ranges far and wide, revealing much private information of almost everyone on the site. Worse, recent major site revamps reproduce much of this information on the public internet through simple Google searches. All current users should try such external searches to gauge whether what they intended to remain private within a closed community is now public even to persons who are not FB members.

4) In its recent mandatory use of Microsoft's Bing to change words on the personal Info tab of user profiles into clickable links, everything on that tab is now publicly visible on the net. The only way to keep such material private is to write nothing there, or delete what one has already written there. This is a truly egregious violation of the presumption of privacy most people bring to social networking sites. Otherwise put, much of the 'social' part of one's profile must be self-destroyed if privacy is to be preserved. If this is not done and those public links are allowed to stand, one is no longer networking but broadcasting to all the major search engines. Worse, the links automatically generated are almost always repetitive, more often than not inappropriate, and grossly distort the presentation of self on which most social networkers initially focus. The main purpose of this change, expanding by at least a factor of three what is visible to the public from just the Info tab, is mainly to allow FB more room for the paid ads on which it depends. An irony advertisers have likely not yet realized is that personal profiles are generally just briefly scanned by new friends, then forgotten, with such social interactions as do occur originating mainly from the overwhelming News Feed. That in turn turns the site into the breeding ground for social trivia it is today.

5) I left FB with over 2,600 'friends.' This network could in theory be very valuable. But only a small fraction of these 2,600 friends ever read what I post on my Wall. That, for the longest time, was mainly information in the form of links. These postings do not appear in the news feeds of most of my friends. Few FBers post or read mainly substantive content, esp on the order of 5-15 per day from a friend like me. Instead, since they are there mostly to socialize, not to get subtantive information, they make use of a Hide Friend option in their news feeds on the default Home page, so that everything I do never appears in their feeds. A large majority of FBers have too many friends, often in the hundreds and upward, making Hiding Friends almost a necessity to keep one's sanity at the overload of stuff thrown at people while using the site. FB does not help matters by suggesting new friends to add during every new visit to Home. The more friends FBers have, the more opportunities FB has to sell ads and make more money.

FB resembles a good social networking site less and less with each passing day. It has become a money machine. Its socializing has become trivialized, and it is hostile to enough exposure for substantive content. In numerous ways, just a few remarked on here, it has deliberately gradually breached the privacy of all its members' data to the point that by now most of that data is public. The best way to protect yourself, and your friends, from further inevitable FB admin mischief is to delete your account.

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The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online - NYTimes.com

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

“I am much more self-censoring,” said Sam Jackson, a student.

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Min Liu, thinking about her career, has begun removing personal information from the Web.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends’ supposedly private information, including personal chats.

Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”

He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.

His Facebook account, which he has had since 2005, is strictly personal. “I don’t want people to know what my movie rentals are,” he said. “If I am sharing something, I want to know what’s being shared with others.”

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

Elliot Schrage, who oversees Facebook’s global communications and public policy strategy, said it was a good thing that young people are thinking about what they put online. “We are not forcing anyone to use it,” he said of Facebook. But at the same time, companies like Facebook have a financial incentive to get friends to share as much as possible. That’s because the more personal the information that Facebook collects, the more valuable the site is to advertisers, who can mine it to serve up more targeted ads.

Two weeks ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to review the privacy policies of social networks to make sure consumers are not being deliberately confused or misled. The action was sparked by a recent change to Facebook’s settings that forced its more than 400 million users to choose to “opt out” of sharing private information with third-party Web sites instead of “opt in,” a move which confounded many of them.

Mr. Schrage of Facebook said, “We try diligently to get people to understand the changes.”

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said.

Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of culture, media and communication at New York University and author of “Privacy in Context,” a book about information sharing in the digital age, said teenagers were naturally protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood, and the frequency with which companies change privacy rules has taught them to be wary.

That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student at Tufts University. Recently she sought to limit the information a friend could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. “I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn’t,” she said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to figure it out after finals.

“I don’t think they would look out for me,” she said. “I have to look out for me.”

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Posting To Facebook Via Mobile? No Update Privacy For You!

May 7, 2010 at 2:05pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It’s kind of crazy. I’ve been playing with Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” search feature recently, and many people who hide their profile information have no problem sharing sometimes really personal updates with the world. Are there people on Facebook who don’t understand how to keep their updates out of the public eye? And why doesn’t Facebook allow for mobile updates to be private?

Searching Everyone’s Updates

You might have missed Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” feature. It’s easy to overlook because search results aren’t shown by default. Consider this search for hungover:

When you start typing, Facebook suggests some options right within the search box. Pick any of those, and you go directly to a person, page or application, rather than overall search results. It’s easy to do this by hitting enter, so that you never get the search results at all.

If you go to the very bottom, there’s a “More Results” option as highlighted above. Click that, and a broader set of results appears:

Notice on the left-hand side of the results, there are options to get results back from all these categories:

• All Results
• People
• Pages
• Groups
• Applications
• Events
• Web Results
• Posts By Friends
• Posts By Everyone

In the search results above, you can see that “All Results” is highlighted, so I should be getting back results from all these categories. However, that’s not what happens. Instead, Facebook only brings back results from matching Pages, Posts By Friends and Web Results. That’s it.

(This, by the way, is just one example of why I often joke to people who warn that Facebook will beat Google in search that Facebook has enough problems searching Facebook itself, much less the entire web.)

Now look what happens if I drill in to the “Posts By Everyone” category:

Suddenly I see what Facebook failed to show me before, all the people on Facebook telling the world about their hangovers.

Sharing Hangovers On Facebook & Twitter

Do these people all mean to share this way? Well, it’s not like people on Twitter don’t share about having hangovers:

They key difference between Facebook and Twitter is that at Twitter, by default you’re sharing with the world. At Facebook, the default for updates is to share only with your friends.

In other words, post to Twitter, and most people probably realize they’re telling something to the world. Post at Facebook, and many people might think they’re only sharing with their friends.

Facebook’s Warnings About Sharing To The World

Indeed, Facebook deserves credit in really making you jump through hoops before you can share an update to the world. For example, here’s what you get in a brand new account, before you’ve ever even posted something:

That links over to a privacy FAQ page, and the only way the message disappears is if you manually click to close it. If you don’t close it, the message reappears each time you come back to the status area.

Beyond that, if you make an update and change from the default “Only Friends” option:

To the “Everyone” option, you get another warning:

After doing a post to everyone, your default remains stuck on “Only Friends.” Facebook doesn’t shift it to “Everyone,” something it could do if it wanted to try and get people to be more public about what they’re sharing, something many people — including myself — suspect them of wanting to do.

You Hide Your Profile, But Not Your Updates?

So why would I think some people don’t understand the Facebook privacy settings, when it comes to updates, especially when they have so many hoops to jump through?

Consider a search for hate my boss. I’m not going to put up a screenshot, because I don’t want to immortalize anyone and get them in trouble. But do that search, and you get posts like:

hate my job. hate my boss.

i hate my job. talked to my managers and boss didn’t help and made it worse

Do people saying these things realize that their bosses might also see the updates? To test, I went to the profiles of 10 people who each appeared in that “hate my boss” search. Here’s what I saw for all 10 of them (I’ve blanked out the name for the example shown):

The message tells me that this person is sharing only some of his info with everyone, right? And yet, I can see their updates. In fact, if I select the “Wall” tab, I see all their updates nicely displayed. If someone’s boss found them by name on Facebook — which isn’t hard to do — they could do the same.

Why would all these people who keep their profiles locked down still share updates? One issue might be that by default, Facebook displays the “this person shares only some things” message to anyone who isn’t someone’s friend, because chances are everyone has some tiny bit of information that by default isn’t shared on Facebook.

Facebook’s Mobile Free-For-All

Another reason is mobile. I fired up the Facebook application for the iPhone. There’s a big “What’s on your mind” box that appears at the top. Enter something, like “I hate my boss,” and that message goes to your Wall — and to the world.

Unlike Facebook itself, there are no privacy settings that I can find in the application, no share with “Only Friends” choice. If you share via the iPhone — and perhaps other mobile devices — you share with the world. That’s also true if you use Facebook’s mobile site on the web. There’s no option there other than to share with the world.

Going back to those 10 people I reviewed? I can also see that 6 of them in the search results are tagged as sharing “via the Mobile Web.” In contrast, for 10 people I looked at who said hate my boss on Twitter, only one seemed to do it via mobile.

Maybe some of those people on Facebook didn’t mean for their updates to go public. Or, maybe they’re just stupid or don’t care. I can’t fault Facebook for how it handles things on its full web site, in terms of highlighting privacy issues with updates. On the mobile front, they look to be screwing up big time.

Advice For The Concerned

By the way, as Facebook’s privacy issues ramp up, I read about more and more people wondering if they should cancel their Facebook accounts. I went through a similar struggle last December (see Now Is It Facebook’s Microsoft Moment?). As a marketer, I ultimately decided I still needed to be on the Facebook platform. But I also shifted to primarily sharing information through my fan page, where everything is public, by default.

I highly recommend fan pages to anyone. It may be a way for you to feel you have more control on Facebook at a time when it’s difficult to understand what Facebook is likely to change next. Don’t be put off on the weirdness of having a “fan” page. Just think of it as a way to have a place on Facebook where you know everything is public, a constant reminder that what you say is being said to the world overtly — rather than a constant fear that what you say or do might get shared to the world without you realizing that.

Alternatively, just assume that all you do on Facebook is public, that there is no privacy. Make that assumption, and you’ll be relatively safe — assuming that apps don’t start tracking all your web surfing habits and reporting back to the Facebook mothership or the world. To be really safe, always log out of Facebook.

Advice For Facebook

To Facebook, my advice is more blunt. Get your shit together. Enough explanations that the web is more comfortable being public or everyone has “granular” privacy controls and other platitudes. Each day, there seems to be some worry — just do a search for Facebook on Techmeme for a summary.

This week, we’ve had everything from private chats being exposed to applications that add themselves to your profile. Today, it’s how people might be sharing to the world stuff they believe is private through your mobile applications.

Someone over there, anyone — stand up and scream that your company is screwing up big time on the privacy front. You keep getting away with it so far, but that might not continue.

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10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

by Dan Yoder

After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided. Let's start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior. From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy. Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch. At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

Update: Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.

6. Facebook is a bully. When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications. At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted. Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web. The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks. Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5#ixzz0nGICv6ph

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