Argh, facebook

The ole book is driving me a bit nuts lately. I am really quite sick of it. But I don't hate it in that way most vocal haters seem to, I get it and I don't think everyone should hate it. I understand the appeal of sharing the ephemera of life, it is what we do in normal 'real' life as well. I like twitter, I like blogging. So why is facebook driving me crazy...

1. Photos. Argh. I like photos, but I like to share them with maybe 5-10 people, not everyone. I am also really sensitive to photos of myself. I know everyone isn't and that they find silly photos hilarious, which is great, but I don't, it makes me sad. Not really because I worry about bad photos, though I do, but also because it just seems so over share to have 15 photos of me at some party on the internet w tags of various people that can make that photo available to maybe 1000 people. I know most of them won't ever look at it but it makes me feel so exposed.

Also for posting my own photos, I stopped using facebook when it became clear that facebook has absolutely no regard for your ownership of the photos, you have to sign away your rights to them and they can use them without asking your permission. Granted the likelihood is low but nevertheless it is so draconian and unnecessary and disrespectful to your users. Also they keep your deleted photos online, if someone has saved a link they can keep visiting that photo even if you delete it. I prefer flickr or picasa or just writing little blogs about them.
Oh and the whole owning thing goes for everything you ever post, not just photos.

2. Too much overlap. When I joined it was just one group of friends on the book, then it was a couple of groups, then it was family and extended family, then it was old school friends, then it was uni colleagues and other work colleagues and people I met at a conference and so on. I feel there is no way to present myself that fits with all these groups. The things I want to discuss with one lot of people I don't want to discuss with others. Partly for privacy reasons, but also just general interest. On twitter I just have my twitter personality and people who like that can follow and those who don't, don't have to. I don't really use twitter to keep in touch with people, so I feel no compunction to gather in everyone. Basically I prefer social media that can reflect my real life groups, rather than pushing everyone into a big group.

This little presentation explains the whole overlap issue really well http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

3. Privacy, facebook seems to have no respect for it. Options are always opt out not in and basic settings I think should exist do not. Like letting us decide not to let people tag us in photos! Instead I have to ask people not to tag me, which seems so dramatic and cranky. This is exacerbated by the fact that I am relatively certain that the reason they don't exist is to force people onto the site and onto more and more clicks on the site. I feel that as social media/networking goes facebook is the biggest but also the baddest.

I think that is all.. I am tempted to delete my page but it feels like such a dramatic reaction, plus there are people who it easy to stay in touch with via the book, so I am happy to keep it for personal messages. Also I help maintain some pages and as far as I know there is no way to do this without having a personal profile.

Sigh. Am I being over dramatic?