Comments on: Farewell, Facebook

By: James

James — Tue, 11 May 2010 05:29:18 +0000

@Les: Planet Venus looked very capable, I just wasn’t excited about it. Plus, why not take the chance to play with some new toys?

By: l.m.orchard

l.m.orchard — Tue, 11 May 2010 03:48:19 +0000

For what it’s worth, I built feeds.mozilla.com on top of Planet Venus. Does a wonderful job of chewing through large numbers of RSS/Atom feeds on a periodic basis, but isn’t what you’d call “realtime”.

By: Playing with the Real-Time Web | Coffee on the Keyboard

Playing with the Real-Time Web | Coffee on the Keyboard — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:58:43 +0000

[...] I left Facebook, I’ve been working on a little project to take its place as an aggregator, or a central hub [...]

By: James

James — Sat, 08 May 2010 05:51:21 +0000

@Tony: I’m fortunate that most things I actually care about come via other channels, like email, IRC, or Twitter, these days. There are a couple of people I only really talk to on Facebook, and that kind of sucks.

Dave: Why thank you.

By: Dave Dash

Dave Dash — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:58:38 +0000

Thanks for having balls and deleting it, rather than deactivating it.

By: Havvy

Havvy — Fri, 07 May 2010 02:01:09 +0000

*Clap* *Clap* You found a capitalistic agreement useful, but due to this change, found it bad. Instead of complaining to the government, you complained using your channels and left the agreement.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:06:34 +0000

Sometimes Facebook makes me feel dirty and/or angry but too many of my friends have turned to it as their sole form of communication and planning. I’m kinda stuck at this point.

By: James

James — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:51:00 +0000

@Tony: That’s good to see, but I’m going to wait until the next big change before I consider going back. This cycle of “go too far, piss people off, step back” is getting old. Like I said, Connections and Instant Personalization couldn’t have happened this way if they thought I owned my data. We’ll see what the next big “feature” brings.

@Matt: I hear it can scale all the way to 5 or 6! I know if I go with something like Tornado it will probably be down all the time. I’m also vaguely considering something like a Django app with a node.js/redis-powered comet stream on top of it.

By: Rafe K.

Rafe K. — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:55:34 +0000

Nice article. You are definitely not wrong. It’s one thing to have these data-sharing policies for profit; it’s quite another to believe you can expose what was once private data without considering how customers will react. People will vote with their feet. But then, they probably believe so much of their own hype they think we’re all drinking the company koolaid.

I signed up for FB a long time ago just because it seemed to be “necessary”, but I never interacted. After this policy change, I revisited my account to find my birthday displayed to the public – this and my email, the only info I had actually given. But wait, didn’t I give them my email password too? I wonder if Zuckerberg enjoyed perusing my email? I do hope they all enjoyed my spam.

Count me among those who will now be closing their FB accounts. It’s not that I can’t handle this policy shift, or the rube-goldbergian obstacle course they set up to exploit the user; it’s that I don’t trust what FB will do tomorrow when my back is turned. They have declared their priorities, which do not align with mine as a user, and so i will happily find the next Friendster or Linkedin or whatever it is. On the Web, like Hollywood, the question isn’t what have you done, but what have you done lately.

Somebody needs to pop FB’s groupthink bubble. You know who else doesn’t believe in internet privacy? The CCP in Beijing. Nice business model – for the powers-that-be, and happy imbeciles. For the rest of us, yeah, not so much.

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:19:16 +0000

But can Tornado scale to handle 1 user?