[kwlug-disc] Quit Facebook Day..

[Paul Nijjar]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 06:01:24PM -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> Just in time for this discussion ...
> 
> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/61884

>From the article: "Just like e-mail has been decentralized over the
past 20 years..."

Wait. What?

If you have an account with Yahoo!, GMail, or Hotmail, you can send
mail. 

If you have an account with a large company with dedicated (or
mostly-dedicated) e-mail administrator, you can maybe send mail. 

Otherwise you are a second-class citizen, and are becoming more
second-class as people become more and more stringent around spam. 

I don't think facebook or other social networking sites are going to
be that different. I already don't envy the Diaspora developers, but
as soon as the spammers figure out how to leverage their decentralized
social networking then I will envy them even less. 

If you are connecting only with people you are in contact
with beforehand I guess it might work (just like e-mail works if you
only have whitelists) but one of the big appeals of The Facebook is
that you can have awkward conversations with and send embarrassing status
updates to all of those people you knew in high school but have
drifted away. Distinguishing "person I lost touch with from high school but
wants to friend me" from "spammer who is leveraging friend-of-a-friend
capabilities" (or better yet "high school acquaintance who is now a
spammer") is going to be an interesting challenge. And even if
that is trivial to solve, you can bet that enterpreneurial Russian
mafiosos will find other interesting ways to hack the system, driving
us towards the big centralized corporate entities we supposedly
mistrust today.

- Paul

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org