I have written
about this before.
Something interesting happened this week. To save you reading
the BBC article if you haven’t, basically, a tiny not-for-profit organization of programmers from the Netherlands (they always are aren’t they, or Sweden or something), with a SINGLE BLOODY LINUX SERVER have seriously upset the most powerful force in social marketing on the planet.
The only web page to get MORE hits than Google, one day of last year (Christmas day).
That’s right, the internet behemoth that is the friendly Facebook. Stalkbook. The FB.
You know Facebook has 350 million users. Half of those roughly are active every single day. They spend an average, average, or 55 minutes on the site each time. Holy shit.
That’s like 100 x times the population of New Zealand on the site.
That’s like the viewing figures of 9x finals of Strictly Come Dancing EVERY SINGLE DAY on your website. Every one of those viewers provide all their demographic information in advance, age, marital status, location. Come on guys, smell the pizza.
It should come as no surprise that advertising on this medium, when TV is in decline, is of a lot of commercial interest. Big companies are the customers of Facebook, not us. The site is expressly set up to exploit our private and personal networks for others’ financial gain. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, it’s just a fact.
So why do we participate? Same reason we eat takeaways and watch telly. We like it. I think Web2.0 is the new great time waster. TV is old hat. Early web was kind of fun but this social networking, presence aware, augmented reality shit, it is right up there. And it’s only just getting started.
Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, these guys are all building infrastructure now like what BT and AT&T do. I have seen it. And those old school companies are shitting themselves. Because they cant do the web thing.
So the point of the blog was,
Web2.0SuicideMachine, has looked at the structure of Facebook, and realized that parts of a relational database can’t just be deleted. You can go and deactivate and “delete” your account, but the connections and everything you’ve ever said to everyone will still be there. In the shadows, but still there, recorded in a relational database and connected to everything else. If they started to delete your bits, it would screw everything else up. So they actually can’t!
So they have a better plan. Log on SuicideMachine, it will go onto Facebook, and in 1/10 of the time it would take you, it will delete every friend connection you ever had, change your name and password, and then forget your password! You’ll be left there, a zombie on the site with no friends. But because your connections are gone, in time the caching should, should, make it very hard for someone to unpick what you said about so-and-so in 15 years time.
Facebook have come down on these guys like a tonne of bricks. The kind of suing they usually reserve for paedophiles, tyrannical dictators and Bernie Madoff. You will find them gone from search engines, caches deleted, their site restricted, news articles gone.
Ah yes but I have nothing to hide I hear you say. Come on, it’s just a bit of fun, right? True, that’s the other viewpoint, nothing is secret anyway, so better yet, live by your principles, and try not to say anything too stupid in public. The internet is PUBLIC.
And no, I don’t want to join your mafia war, I’m not interested in an old TV ad from 1987 (ooh look its so funny), or making a collage of my freaking Facebook statuses from 2009! Like, WTF?
