Teetering on the edge of deleting my Facebook account, but it’s so damn hard. It is a lobster trap with your friends as bait, and I can’t resist the bait! The tension between hating Facebook and loving my friends (hooray for ambient awareness) puts me in a bit of a pickle. Here is the series of recent links that got me to teetering:

• Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook seems like it’s pretty much the de facto voice of the current backlash.
• Why You Should Still Quit Facebook is Yoder’s followup.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out a timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy.
• Matt McKeon created a great interactive visualization (with Processing.js, very cool), The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook showing how Facebook’s default privacy settings have changed over time.
• Arvind Narayanan chipped in some good solid commentary.
• Finally, there’s the fact that I set “Interests” and “Things I Like” to “Friends Only,” but my “Likes and Interests” still show up on my public profile. No way to view that as anything but deceitful or incompetent on FB’s part.

That pretty much lays it out. If nothing else, this makes me feel old. What I really want is for the Diaspora guys to do a bang-up job, and have all my friends move to that.

P.S. It’s not so much that I’m concerned with my own privacy, I just really don’t want Facebook to get away with this epic bait-and-switch. They have no honor, and I hate supporting them (under their business plan, participation=support). But again, love my friends. Argh!

You can ask Matt Held to paint your Facebook portrait photo:

With the development of social networking sites, I’ve developed an interest in how people take simple or complex snapshots of themselves, post them to their page as a representation of who they are and what they want people to see. It is an interesting form of control and, in a way, self-preservation. However, there is a strong likelihood that many people who don’t know you will see this photo representation and make passing judgments as to who you may or may not be, much in the same way we make passing judgments on people we see in our neighborhoods every day.

Take a collection of these portraits and put them into the context of a gallery space or like setting, and you see a community of individuals- their likeness elevated and memorialized like the original commissioners of portrait painting; the rich and powerful – displayed as a portrait’s original intent: expression of an individuals’ character and moral quality.

To apply simply join the I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held Facebook group. (via andrew sullivan)

Interesting article at The Economist applying the Dunbar number to Facebook.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

(via waxy)

Australian courts pave the way for Facebook statuses like, “Jim is pissed because he just got served on his goddamn WALL!”