It’s settled. I’m keeping Facebook. I know it sounds a little conceited, as though you were all sitting around twiddling your thumbs while I decided whether or not I would keep my Facebook. I was thinking about getting rid of it, though, and the reason I decided to keep it is actually kinda cool.

I read an article on TechCrunch just before I moved about ‘social media fatigue’ and what it means about your involvement in your favorite social networks. The author’s basic premise is that fatigue comes when you’re using social media too much, spreading yourself too thin over too many useless relationships.

I really appreciate that, mostly because I’ve always seen Facebook as little more than voyeurism. Yes, it has helped me stay in touch with friends from college, but to this day I get friend requests from people who were never my friends and with whom I haven’t spoken in a decade or more. I can’t stand that stuff, but when one of them has been my friend, I tend to let everyone in, and I shouldn’t have. So today I did my diligence and deleted everyone that I don’t know, everyone that I don’t talk to on at the very least a semi-regular basis, and anyone I don’t want looking at my pictures, my info, my posts.

It’s not just keeping Facebook – I want to get good at Facebook. Better, at least. I want to make better use of the tool for the thing I care to use it for, which is keeping in touch with the people I care about. When it stops serving that purpose, it’s gone.

This weekend Zuckerberg sat down with Michael Arrington to talk Facebook privacy. I found Zuckerberg’s comments pretty disconcerting, even more so today after an anonymous employee gave an interview to The Rumpus.

The most interesting was when the employee admitted to a master password for every account, one that used to be ‘Chuck Norris’ spelled with letters, numbers, and symbols. Now, the password only worked from inside Facebook offices, but I can’t imagine a scenario under which an employee would need to actually log in to the site as anyone else. Wouldn’t there be internal diagnostic tools for viewing that information? A database viewer perhaps?

There’s also the fact that Facebook logs all of the information pertaining to your usage. That allows it to implement handy features like remembering whose site you visit most so it appears at the top of your searches. But that’s not all that gets logged. There’s also all of the information you’ve ever entered, including the stuff that you’ve deleted.

I hate to sound like a fear monger, but I think it’s important for people to be aware of how much information is held on Facebook’s servers and how many people have access to that information. It’s more than I thought, on both accounts.

I logged into Facebook last month probably three times, for all of which I was greeted by a screen that warned of new privacy settings. I ignored the messages and went about my usual routine, rejecting friend requests from the high school acquaintances and responding to week-old messages. Then the changes showed up in all the blogs I read and I went back to look over them. It was a serious shift and, as you probably know, a move away from the privacy we’ve all held so dear (or learned to guard after pictures show up).

The weird thing is, Facebook was built on giving users more privacy, not less. It was one of the major differentiators between Facebook and MySpace, the feature most people point to when they talk about why the former is so successful compared to its counterpart. Zuckerberg talked about the change this weekend with Michael Arrington. His reasons for the change are surprising, and a little disconcerting when you realize he’s helping direct the policy changes.

Here’s a quote that might scare you: “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Here’s some news, Mark, you are the social norm. If anything, Facebook is setting trends offline, not vice versa, and that will only continue as more people come to the site.

Here’s another one:

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

You know there are few things I want to hear less than “we just went for it” when it comes to information privacy. I can respect the philosophy behind the “beginner’s mind” strategy, but you also have to realize your multi-billion dollar valuation and the fact that you have permanently impacted the direction of the entire internet. That’s not the type of situation to just go for it because that’s what beginners might do.

If anything, the most recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings have made me a much more discerning Facebook user. I’m much less prone to add people simply because I haven’t talked to them in a while. Honestly, I’m much less likely to keep my profile public for much longer. Sure, it can be a great way to stay in touch, but if it’s at the expense of making more and more of what I consider private information public, I’m more than willing to delete the account.

Facebook rolled out a new feature yesterday that just might restore my faith in the service. I’ve long hated Facebook, and that hatred only grew as the site became more “feature-rich,” that is to say a much bigger pain in my ass. Luckily, I finally have some respite from all the requests for Mafia and Texas Hold ‘Em: Facebook Lite.

Originally intended for use in countries where broadband is sporadic or even nonexistent, Facebook Lite offers a slimmed down version of the social service, removing all the extra applications and goodies in favor of a much more utilitarian user interface. You get the bare bones, nothing more. I love it.

Facebook had this to say:

We decided to roll out Facebook Lite in the U.S. to give users a simple, expedient alternative to facebook.com, and hope that it will fill this need. While the majority of our user base is outside the United States, we’re always working to enhance the new user experience even in markets where facebook.com is easily accessible. We have also found that people who are new to Facebook tend to be most interested in a simpler experience, focus on establishing their network of friends and communicating with them by writing on their walls, sending messages, and looking at pictures. We have introduced the Lite site with these new users in mind.

I might actually log in more than my typical twice a month. You can check out the new service at lite.facebook.com.

Source: TechCrunch

Most everyone has seen or heard of social networking sites affecting privacy in crazy ways. They’ve cost people jobs, ended countless relationships, and in the best cases, resulted in some bruised pride. As more people get hit, more users are choosing to remove questionable content from their pages, but the content’s not necessarily gone.

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng put recent findings from Cambridge University researchers to the test with some unsavory results. Turns out your deleted pictures may not be as far gone as you’d like.

Jacqui tested Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr with the same method. She deleted pictures from each site on May 21st and then watched the direct links for six weeks. Twitter and Flickr were both good, truly deleting the pictures after a hard refresh. MySpace and Facebook didn’t fare so well. Direct links from both sites still produce the “deleted” images, some six weeks after they were pulled.

Moral of the story? Continue to censor your drunken impulses, particularly with regard to the pictures you upload.