Having been involved in an effort to sell privacy protection to individuals and vendors I think I am quite sensitive to the issues so maybe it’s worth treating me as an early warning indicator.

What Facebook and others are doing has made me very uncomfortable; they’re changing the deal and in ways I don’t like. I think there were ways to implement Beacon and Social Ads that, while they would have followed a less sharp revenue growth curve, would not have rung alarm bells for me. They choose not to go that way. More here:

http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002718.html

I think Facebook and the rest have gotten an overinflated view of their importance to us. What, after all, do they actually do? They run a website with some gadgets on it. They’re good at marketing. Nothing about their site is particularly rocket science or even innovative. They were just the best at packaging those features for a generation that was receptive to the idea of social networking sites.

But, as with blogging, I believe we don’t need large corporations to do social networking and, in bringing the network back under our control, we gain benefits and protection from interests other than our own.

Anyway… just a little more perspective on my views.

Cheers,

Matt