CNN asks "When did Facebook become so uncool?" - Duh....The day it was created

I've said it here numerous times....FACEBOOK is not cool, never has been. It was created by a guy who wanted to extract revenge on other Harvard types that wouldn't allow him to be one of the "cool kids". This is NOT the kind of thing you want to be involved with.

Now, Facebook is becoming " Big Brother " and people are finally waking up to the real insidious nature of what Zuckerberg created and profited from...People admire him - I see nothing but a geeky kid who created his own world and got many "sheep-ple" to follow him.

Not me. Not now, not ever. Do yourself a favor and kill your Facebook account.
Really, you'll thank me later.

CNN ? - They are as clueless as the other sheep-ple who gave Zuckerberg $$$ for getting people to follow his unethical website which is now being seen for what it really is....worthless. To think that people feel this sham is worth $$$ is unbelievable to me and proves what P.T. Barnum knew 100 years ago:

" There's a sucker born every minute"


When did Facebook become so uncool? By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.

Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.

When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.

Pundits weren't kind to Facebook, either. David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like "Big Friend," a gentler variation on George Orwell's all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook -- twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.

This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it's the Nickelback to Instagram's Bon Iver.

Facebook and Instagram's images couldn't be more different, so it's tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: "Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?" A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.

"It's official, Facebook is becoming uncool," CBS declared.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook's image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook's current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.

First: Money. Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn't monetized its product. It didn't support advertisements and apparently didn't sell its users' data.

Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal's recent feature "Selling You on Facebook," which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.

Second: Size. As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet -- the search engine that didn't have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was "Don't Be Evil." As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google "built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect."

That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company -- and to question its motives.

Gizmodo: "In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services -- Gmail, Search, YouTube and more -- and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for."

People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It's the kind of company journalists love to use the word "scrappy" to describe.

Third: Trust. As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they're pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.

According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport's site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.

"You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don't trust Facebook -- despite Mark Zuckerberg's promises -- with their networks and memories," Garber writes. "You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure."

Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.

In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: "We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand."

Finally: The cool factor. Maybe it's less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn't as cool as it used to be -- partly because it's so popular and also because it's not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster -- all of Facebook's predecessors -- didn't survive (or didn't continue to grow) for this long.

Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility -- you cold post photos easily from your phone -- and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.

"Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its 'cool', rapidly," wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.

Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate -- a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)

It's not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that's independent from Facebook and that people won't have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.

"Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy," Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. "They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. ..."

There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg's network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It's seen as the big, bland company that the app's users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.

Photo of the day

Good advice for those who are too involved in Facebook - Posting and walking are not compatible.

The " F" in Facebook stands for " FAIL"

Articles like this one give me satisfaction as the idiots who fawn over Facebook are as clueless as those who use it. I wrote about the utter stupidity that Facebook represents and how I was NEVER going to join it as it was a vapid, self centered brainchild of a feckless kid who went to Harvard and was pissed off at the rich kids who shunned him. He created Facebook as his pentulant revenge to show how he could become better than the rich bullies who shunned him.

So now, All the "Cool Kids" are quitting Facebook ? How about the COOLER people knew better than to ever use it in the first place....To those who have invested in this empty place on the web, you've been had....It amounts to the newest version of AOL. Both are over and both were given too much credit for very little other than fleecing people of personal info and enabling people to place way too much info on the web that didn't need to be there.

When people act like sheep, they are usually lead to slaughter....don't be a sheep. Be a Sheepdog.

All the Cool Kids Are Quitting Facebook
Atlantic Monthly

Adam Clark Estes

The best reason to quit Facebook can be summed up in one quote from a 29-year-old in Jenna Wortham's latest item in The New York Times: "People always raise an eyebrow. But my life has gone on just fine without it." Like a lot of Times trend pieces, people have been talking about this phenomenon for ages. But Wortham's news peg is startling. Citing comScore Wortham reports that Facebook is continuing to grow in the United States, but after a 56 percent boost from October 2009 to October 2010, Facebook grew only ten percent from October 2010 to October of this year. Why? Well, Wortham gives a lot of reasons, quoting experts and so forth. But it's all very clear to us. To wear out that worn out Social Network quote a bit more: Joining Facebook isn't cool. You know what's cool? Quitting Facebook

Facebook will offer " Cloud Girlfriend " - They oughta rename it to "FAKEBOOK"

People are acting more delusional and Facebook is leading the way in assisting them.



It used to be that if you made something up to deceive others, it was seen as dishonest and wrong...now, we have a start-up company that will provide you with an online " Cloud Girlfriend " who will provide you with "the illusion" of a real person who is your girlfriend....and chats with you online so other Facebook users can see this....

WTF?? I think by the nature of what it represents, and how people use the product (by design), we should rename Facebook to FAKEBOOK as the stuff it shows people is more fake than real....

One more sign that people should ditch Facebook and focus on having real realtionships with friends & family....Facebook and the "Cloud Girlfriend" start-up offer a "fake" sense of connection to real relationships...and the narcissistic nature of this type of behavior is just repugnant.

Fake Facebook Girlfriends From "Cloud Girlfriend" Will Be Run By Real People Dylan Love Mar. 28, 2011, businessinsider.com

Get A Fake Facebook Girlfriend With New Startup "Cloud Girlfriend"
"Cloud Girlfriend," is a startup that creates the "perfect girlfriend" out of thin air for users. The "perfect girlfriend" then sends you public messages on your Facebook wall, so you can deceive your friends into thinking you have a girlfriend as well as make you feel like you have a companion.

After we covered the company, co-founder David Fuhriman reached out to fill us in on some more details about Cloud Girlfriend: Cloud Girlfriend will consist of a network of real human beings, not automated bots, that users will interact with over Facebook. Fuhriman thinks it can help guys get a girlfriend.

If visitors to your Facebook profile to see wall posts from your imaginary sweetheart, they might think, "Someone else thinks highly enough of this person to date him, so maybe I should too." Cloud Girlfriend is not a porn site or adult chat service. (Although it does remind us of a hotline where you can talk to someone of the opposite sex if you're lonely.)

Fuhriman said the site has a therapeutic value and can fulfill psychological needs like intimacy and friendship even though the interaction is virtual. He also maintains that these interactions can even build self confidence and help users navigate real-life situations. We asked Fuhriman for some details about how he plans to follow Facebook's terms of service and make money, but he said those were details he couldn't go into.

If he's going to be toying with Facebook profiles to create fake girlfriends, we assume Facebook will hammer him. Facebook doesn't want spammy accounts filling up the social network. Fuhriman thinks his company will enhance someone's experience on a social network, not dilute it. He also notes it's already filled with fake accounts: "There will always be more profiles of dogs and cats on social networks than there will ever be of Cloud Girlfriends."

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies(and online programs) do....

Let me start by saying I am not afraid of technology....I embraced the use of computers as far back as the late 1970s when a computer was a huge teletype at the High School and the computer it communicated with was a bigger mainframe miles away...I bought an Apple Mac (Mac Plus) back in the mid 80s.. I find them to be useful tools and like any other tool, if misused, it can injure you.

I am no fan of Facebook and it's pervasive intrusion into all aspects of online life...updates available through your car's computerized systems are obnoxious...The ability for others to gain info is bad enough but people willingly sign up for this crappola...and pay for it too! My vehicle needs to start, run and get me from point " A" to " B " and back again....If I need to let people know where I am, I can call them or text them.....Having the car update them or getting updates from my car is plain stupid. Do yourself a favor and KILL your Facebook account while you can....really...you'll thank me later on.

So now we get to the cell phone....a necessity these days....I have a non-GPS phone that texts and calls but not much else....It works fine and I really don't need mobile games or e-mail....I have the IPAD for that stuff...as needed.

Well owners of the so called " Smartphones" might want to read this....they are tracking your every move and you are enabling them to do so....Like anything else, that info is fine as long as it isn't misused....just like the rest of the technology helpers we have....makes you think about it, eh?

One Politician in Germany decided to find out what they were tracking about himself...the picture he paints ain't pretty.....

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know
By NOAM COHEN - NT TIMES
Published: March 26, 2011

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

Malte Spitz was surprised by how much detail Deutsche Telekom had about his whereabouts.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.

Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.

For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.

And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”

While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.

“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

You are in the very best of hands (part 2) - Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites

Not that I treat the HUFFPO as any great source of Journalism but my regard for FACEBOOK is about equal to how I regard the Taliban....Facebook is the dumbest of dumb things you can do.....Really, what part of your brain has to think that exposing all the personal details of your life online could be a positive experience???? REALLY.....I may rant and talk about stuff here, but there is no amount of real personal data here for anyone to gain....on Facebook, they can get every last detail about you and all your online " Friends"

NOW, they will let advertisers and others (who pay the right amount of $$$) to access all your personal data including cell phone number and addresses....

Face it, FACEBOOK will be looked back on in about 10 years as one of the stupidest things that people did and all the money/time/effort that was wasted on it....Think about how much speculative bull-shite they have gained due to people giving them money and thinking that money is well invested?? FACEBOOK has no product, no real value....it is all a bunch of bullcrap and others are making money off your personal info....what a scam.

People used to say, " KILL YOUR TV " as they thought it was sapping people's ability to think....I say " KILL YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT " while you can....really. You will thank me later on.


Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites
03/ 2/11 08:43 PM - HUFFPO

Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users' home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen.

Facebook quietly announced the new policy in a note posted to its Developer Blog in January. It suspended the feature just three days later following user outcry, while promising that it would be "re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."

In response to a letter penned by Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) expressing concern over the new functionality, Facebook reaffirmed that it will be allowing third parties to request access to users' addresses and phone numbers.

Facebook noted that it is considering implementing controls that would more explicitly highlight the personal nature of the information being transmitted to applications and explained it is "actively considering" whether to restrict users under 18 years old from sharing their contact information with third-party developers.

"We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information," Facebook's Marne Levine, vice president of global public policy, wrote in the letter to Reps. Markey and Barton. "[H]owever, we are currently evaluating methods to further enhance user control in this area."

Facebook has attempted to tread a fine line with regard to privacy issues even as it has continuously pushed users to share more information, both on Facebook and beyond the social network.

The plan to open up users' address and phone numbers to third-party sites and services marks the latest frontier in Facebook's often controversy-fraught efforts to encourage users to be more liberal in sharing their data and online activity.

Even if the revamped feature were to include improved notifications and protections for minors, privacy experts warn the feature could imperil users' personal information and increase their risk of being targeted by scams, spam, and identity thieves.

Though Facebook prohibits applications from selling users' information or sharing it with advertisers and data brokers, malicious, rogue apps spreading phishing scams and other ruses are not uncommon on the social network. With just a few errant clicks, an unsuspecting user could potentially hand over her home address to a scammer peddling diet cures or free iPads in an effort to compile credit card data and other personal information.

"[Scammers] might be able to impersonate you if they had your phone number," said Norman Sadeh-Koniecpol, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. "They're saying, 'Please give us your phone number,' but they're not telling you whether they'll share it or whether they'll sell it or use if for malicious purposes. In fact, you don't know who you're dealing with."

Others are concerned with what they see as Facebook's willingness to change the rules of play--first encouraging people to share personal information with a more limited group of friends, then allowing that data to be accessed in new, unexpected ways.

"People never thought when they were posting this data [such as their phone numbers] that it would be accessible to anyone but friends. There's a real mismatch of expectations around that," said Mary Hodder, chairman of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. "Even if Facebook comes back with new protections, they're still saying, 'Hey, get over it, your data is public.' I feel badly for users that Facebook's approach is 'You give us anything and it's all fair game.'"

Despite the social network's intentions to make addresses and phone numbers accessible to developers, Rep. Markey offered Facebook measured praise for its response, while stressing the necessity of protecting younger users.

"I'm pleased that Facebook's response indicated that it's looking to enhance its process for highlighting for users when they are being asked for permission to share their contact information," Rep. Markey said in a statement. "I'm also encouraged that Facebook is deciding whether to allow applications on the site to request contact information from minors. I don't believe that applications on Facebook should get this information from teens, and I encourage Facebook to wall off access to teen's contact information if they enable this new feature."

UPDATE: Facebook has contacted The Huffington Post with the following statement:

Despite some rumors, there's no way for other websites to access a user's address or phone number from Facebook. For people that may find this option useful in the future, we're considering ways to let them share this information (for example to use an online shopping site without always having to re-type their address). People will always be in control of what Facebook information they share with apps and websites


Repeat after me......" Riiiiiiigggghhhhttt"