Facebook, the new blackhole

Facebook added support for over 60 new apps on Wednesday with partners including Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest and others, giving interested users the chance to share more about their daily activities. – Hayley Tsukayama, Walshington Post

While reading this morning’s news I was stunned to see a ‘new’ article about Facebook. Surely I jest since Facebook is news everyday, mostly by design of their marketing department. The rest of the time because the site was hack/defaced or Zuckerberg and his lollipop kids ‘accidentally’ committed a privacy violation. With that in mind it was kind of refreshing to read an article that highlighted the addition of 60 applications with a built-in feature called, “Auto-share” so users can share even more information about themselves, automagically!

Let the data mining commence!

According to Business Insider Facebook’s revenue as of December 2011 missed expectations at about 2 billion dollars. And all of it came from ad revenue generated in one way or another from mining personal data added by Facebook users. According to Hal Abelson, a professor at MIT who co-taught a course called “Gaydar,” “Facebook pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.” Ironically the purpose of Gaydar was to predict the likelihood of a Facebook user’s religious affiliations, political leanings and even sexual orientation via “Friending” someone.

So not only is all the information people add to their Facebook page; essentially data stored on another person’s (Mark Zuckerberg) computer, freely available and used liberally for the purpose of making a whole lot of other people very rich, but when Facebook finally goes the way of MySapce, all those pictures and diaries will go away too, into the Facebook Blackhole!