"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

in fact, it's a bit reminiscent of those accounts of east Germans who get to read their Stasi files and are horrified at the obsessive catalogue of mundanity gathered on them.

Right I gather a lot of people are stunned at the realization of just how much of their info has been given over to FB over time.

I think it's the first time that a lot of people are being exposed to what a seriously big database can be like, when somebody puts their mind to it. I mean, if you weren't nerding it up, the trend in personal computing has almost been the opposite: your data is really fragile, and will be gone if you're not careful to preserve it.

Think of the stuff people use tech for most, and it's all seemingly short-lived: For the longest time email was limited, so you had to delete your old stuff, and it still is for just about everything apart from GMail and recently Yahoo mail. Shared drives at work are always being cleared out. Links on the web are forever breaking, blogs just vanish. Flickr will hide your old photos if you stop paying. etc etc.

I think people might have had an abstract awareness that Facebook was different, but for them suddenly to present you with every fact they've ever gleaned about you (or at least the ones they'll tell you about) in one page when it wasn't stuff you made any attempt to keep permanent is jarring, in this context.

I mean, I have known for a while that they were going to the limits of database tech in their quest to store *everything*, right down to keeping tally of each time you look at someone's profile, and it's still a bit disquieting for me. I wonder how people who had no idea about this will take it.

An interesting post, thanks.

I have a rather scared respect for facebook because of quite how huge and powerful it has managed to become.

right down to keeping tally of each time you look at someone's profile, and it's still a bit disquieting for me.

yeah I remember hearing from a fb engineer [hearsay] that they keep track of every click you make on that site. jeez

no wonder my crushes keep on appearing in my stream

That click tally stuff won't appear in the timeline, right?

Individual click/view tallies on every photo, complete with time & date stamps!

It doesn't yet, but I can totally see a "best friends" tab or something that inadvertently reveals it. XP yeah or on photos.

It's getting really hard to work out what will leak info and what won't. Can people tell you unsubscribed from them?

shit, delete the internet

lol, if facebook decides to be evil and just starts to reveal all this info that would be extremely damaging to relationships (who unsubscribed from who, PM's, that time you clicked 50 times on that one chick's photo) just to be sociopathic and destroy the world

Imagine a time when what you pay for on your premium facebook account is to stop them from releasing the information they have built up on you over the last 5+ years to all your 'friends'.

wait, photos have stats?

I can see the opposite - pay $50 to find out who's clicked on your profile the most!

They actually used to have a line in a FAQ somewhere that said "we will never reveal which profiles you have looked at".

"Hi krakow! Remember that PM you sent in 2007 about how you were thinking about leaving your girlfriend? For the cheap cheap price of $5 per month you can keep us from posting it directly to her wall. We hope you're enjoying facebook. We are constantly committed to making it better and better.

Sincerely,
Mark"

Maybe they're building to holding us all to ransom once they have a billion peoples' worth of browsing/clicking/friending/commenting/liking etc etc habits all nicely catalogued and us tightly psychologically profiled through sheer weight of beautifully databased information overload.

You gave me a shiver Mordy!

IIRC, the old "photo memories" feature was based on profile views. So--if you were like me--most of what you got was crushes, and--also if you were like me--if you clicked on one of those photos, it lead to another, and before you knew it you've wasted 5-10 minutes creating fb blackmail.

They would know that one was wanting to leave one's partner by mapping subtle changes in profile browsing, photo viewing & status commenting (etc) habits anyway; there would be no need for anything so direct as an actual sent message to be involved.

I'm looking forward to the timeline telling me exactly when I got over crushes as my profile viewings dropped.

Can people tell you unsubscribed from them?

It doesn't pop up in any feed, no. Though I saw instructions for how to do this using Timeline - I think you view the new friends you made each year and see who has "Add Friend" next to them.

of course, that means almost nothing if you're the one who has done tons of unfriending. there were plenty of ppl that had add friend next to them that either a) i unfriended b) i couldn't remember and every time c) i didn't care. if you haven't noticed you're no longer friends w/ a particular someone before checking the list, it shouldn't matter to you

stet way otm

its always bothered me how insanely difficult it was to access your posts from months and years back-- "if that still exists, why is it so impossible for me to access it?" or "if its so impossible for me to access it, why bother hanging on to it?"

but now that you can get to it so easily, its terrifying.

I have bitter experience of the "memorable status updates" feature that appeared about 6 months ago. It's one of the reasons that I'm so particularly morbidly fascinated with all this.

The thing I liked about "memorable status updates" is it kept pulling stuff my irl best friend posted when he was really, really baked.

Not that I mean to keep bringing it up, I know I know, but Livejournal's always had a neat, easily accessed archive page, in a kind of calendar format. Ive had once since 2000, and I can go back to any time (and there wa s a time when me and everyone I knew heavily used LJ the way ppl now use FB) and read dozens of old posts, stuff I'd long forgotten. The point being, I'm used to the concept of old stuff still being thre and frankly I like the idea I'll be able to easily see it on FB again.

If nothing else dont forget it makes it easier to review and delete old shit :)

Anyone watching 'Person of Interest'? It's p much based on what Facebook will soon become...

so wait i missed the last week-- is this timeline thing:

A) still not fully operational
B) going to end up being the default profile view eventually?

A) It's slowly rolling out over the next three weeks.
B) Yes.

gross, think i'm gonna quit

I'm gonna at least see what it looks like, and as long as I can do a bunch of deleting, I dont know if I'll mind but if I cant, fuck that noise.

quitting ilx too, l8r

I am cool with the timeline but was freaked because the first click I made was to jump back a couple years and the first post was "hey guys I'm proud to say I'm engaged" which really shows how far my life has come

It's awesome, instead of scrolling through the tedium of updates, new friends can skim over years and catch the highlights, prioritized by activity and comments. For better or worse.

surely there's no see-who-looked-at-your-profile/pics lark as part of this? wouldn't that mean that peeople would almost entirely stop looking at other people's profiles, lest they thought you were stalking them or whatever. that can't be right; people would barely look at each others' pics if that were the case.

Friendster used to have that feature, with the caveat of "If you turn this off where people can't see what pics you've been looking at, then you won't be able to see who has been looking at your pics!" which I think every sane person then said "FINE OKAY THEN."

LinkedIn is crummy this way too. No, you don't know who exactly has been looking at your profile, but you can still figure it out by looking at the "Persons Who Recently Looked At This Profile Also Looked At These" feature.

I mean, c'mon. All those Okies showing up and I know only one person in Tulsa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apKX4_WU9Ak

so not THAT big a deal. basically shows you all your activity that anyone else could have seen already anyway, but in a mental new order. one obvious side effect is a whole new era of mega-solipsism kicking in for a new generation.

ok but it makes finding what moronic stuff i was posting 4 years ago as easy as a single search instead of clicking "show older posts" 10,000 times, right?

Yeah, pretty much.

mm seems so. people will find having all their old stuff from years ago thrown back at them a bit alarming, but i don't quite see where all the privacy issue stuff is coming from. seems like just a re-jigging of the format as far as i can tell from reading around and videos like that one.

is there a way to get the new timeline w/o telling them you're a developer or whatever yet?

just tell them you're a developer. it'll take you a minute and a half.

i don't want to write a facebook app!!!

just tell then you are the table

these ten stories

just tell them you miss them

you don't have to write an app

i am going to tell them i want root access to their servers

Hmm. I never filled in any of the stuff the timeline wants. No work or school info, I dont display my bday or family connections. Whats the timeline going to base anything ON, exactly?

time

don't waste yours on me