Facebook – Page 10 – Ciaran Laval

As much as I dislike Facebook, the company that is, it needs to be said that Facebook isn’t going to eat your children, run off with your wife or burn you to death whilst you’re questing in the Wetlands, as Deathwing did to me last night!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of Facebook, it’s the practices of the company that make it an area of debate and some of those practices are not comfortable viewing, this is why when Blizzard wanted everyone to use their real names on the forums, there was a backlash and complaints to privacy bodies, because Facebook goes beyond your circle of real life friends and neighbours and that’s where the issues start, hence why Facebook have been in talks with the German authorities regarding privacy settings on their friend finder feature, as reported by AFP here.

Over at New World Notes, Hamlet Au is talking of how Second Life was once considered the social networking platform of the future and how Facebook has passed it in spectacular fashion. There’s an interesting video there from 2006 featuring Robin Harper, who has been working for Playdom since November, a company who specialise in Facebook games. Continue reading “Facebook won’t eat your children”

The news that Facebook will soon be using likes in a new advertising initative should be enough for Linden Lab to get those widgets off web profiles and quite frankly it should be happening now. The idea is that someone will like a brand and this will appear on their Facebook profile in an initiative called Sponsored Stories, as reported here at Cnet. Oh it’s organic advertising, it’s a revenue stream for Facebook which is a free to use service, there’s no harm in it, right?

Well it’s not just sponsored stories that are an issue, let’s take a case of a Second Life user who decided to like his Second Life profile, and then went and signed into Facebook,as described in this forum thread. The Second Life user found, upon signing into Facebook, that that Like had been recorded on his Facebook profile, even though he doesn’t believe he was signed into Facebook when he clicked the Like.

Now Facebook does like to try and get you to stay signed in and there are of course cookies, but the whole thing is quite frankly creepy. There are also issues of just how easily one can link Second Life to First Life via clicking likes and engaging with Facebook. Linden Lab have not been upfront about the consequences of running Facebook and Second Life on the same computer, maybe they aren’t aware of them, but this is another reason why those widgets should be taken off people’s profiles right now. Continue reading “Creepy Facebook Advertising Should end Widgets”