Love Facebook while you can...

So based on the Graphing Social Patterns conference footage I've been watching Facebook may not be much of a fun free social environment for long. In our capitalist dominated money-obsessed America little can stay popular before it's bought, sold, reinvented and otherwise turned into some kind of profit raising scheme. The addition of applications to Facebook isn't automatically a sell-out but the hob nobs in business seem to be talking about pervasive and intrusive advertising into just about every single niche and alcove in the system. You know those pages like the DI website or Yahoo where you almost have to sort through all of the adds and jumbled text to find the true content and meaning of the site? Yeah the business think tank operators and economic powers that be are on the brink of cursing us with that kind of atrocity. They talk of Facebook hotels and paying popular people on Facebook to convince you to buy products.

Right now the system is managed by its users - largely they get to create the realm in which they interact. If Facebook goes public and the control is turned over to shareholders, then we see the typical unethical and disheartening mess that is contemporary corporate America take control and dominate our once open and free (at least mostly) environment. If a given developer constructs an app, Facebook is concerned about helping that developer. They attend to user needs and desires and I believe they honestly want to make a system that's cool and enables people to connect. App creators aren't allowed to run the place, however, and that's how it should be. When it becomes all about the business (Facebook and others) the story takes a turn for the worse. Toss the control over to the ruling class of America (the usual crowd of rich white, mostly male capitalist pigs) we'll see a domination of the free environment by groups like hedge funds and old people who don't know a thing about the system or its users - but instead just wish to make money. Personally as much of a jerk as Zuckerberg is portrayed to be by the media I like him a hell of a lot better then the souless corporates that run the rest of the world.

The media is all up in arms talking about Facebook as a threat to privacy, I think our biggest concern ought to be the threat of corporate America to Facebook.