We Should See Other Blogs

Really. I thought they were cool because they used an open source toolchain, contributed back to the open source community occasionally, and seemed to care about my privacy. Facebook wasn’t particularly useful; I never found a friend there who I really wanted to communicate with, nor did it seem a revolution in service. My friends were my real-life friends. The Facebook experience was the same old social web, rehashed, and in a lot of ways pleasantly limited.

I wasn’t one of those snobby first-wave college users. I wasn’t even a second- or third-waver. I was just one of those people that joined because a lot of people seemed to be using it.

I never sunk a lot of time into Facebook. The most, maybe, was playing Scrabulous on the site. I don’t have a real attachment to the site. Frankly, I would prefer a distributed network, like, um, the internet, rather than a site with one point of control and failure.

That said, Facebook was nice enough. It showcased all the best things integrated applications do best: It was seamless, it was networked, and it was, well, integrated. You didn’t have to think about anything too much.

Then, it began to show the worst things about integrated applications: It became sprawling, unfocussed, and ultimately lost any credibility it had had in my eyes.

How did it lose this creditability? Well, as soon as it started depending overly on ad revenue, glaring, bothersome ad revenue. As soon as started seeing its customer base as a cash-cow to be milked, especially when it does so at the expense of privacy, as with the recent Beacon debacle. If a company is willing to track what I buy and then publish those results to my friends unless I opt out every time, I consider that evil.

I don’t care what they’ve done to fix it now. That Zuckerberg and company would stoop this low is just a hint of what sort of morals they have as a company. It makes the allegation that Zuckerberg stole the original implementation of Facebook from colleagues at Harvard that much more believable. It makes the whole thing seem slimy, slightly dirty.

Why am I talking about Facebook in the past tense, you wonder?

I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m opting out. Closing down shop. Kicking the bucket out from underneath my Facebook account.

I feel a bit cleaner already.

Attribution and License for the above photo.

• Fruit Loops hurt. No matter how you eat them, they scuff up the inside of your mouth. I know, you can let them soak for a while, but who wants to eat soggy cereal?
• At Freshwater Church this Sunday — having braved an early winter storm to get there – we got to see Joel and Tim operating on no sleep. They’d just come back from Cleveland, driving all night through that early winter storm. Thankfully, Joel only had to say a few words, as he didn’t really say most of those words in an particular order. Instead, Jeff (I think? I could be wrong) lit the advent candle and did a sermon about Hope.
• A lot of people seem to think that lighting an advent candle is pretty hokey, but being the lover of tradition that I am, I like to see a church expressing a connection with the past. Partaking in an ancient tradition (Advent, not necessarily the lighting of candles) and singing the songs of that tradition remind me that I’m part of something that extends beyond me, beyond just the present, and into the past and future.
• My workplace is moving soon — not just me, the whole thing — meaning I’m going to be 10 minutes closer to home. Everyone else, on the other hand, is 10 minutes farther away, or more if you count the trickiness of the highways in that area. It also makes taking the bus quite feasible, actually, as it cuts almost a half hour off the bus ride, thanks to the trickiness of the bus routes in that area.
• When it comes to grammar I’m really not a prescriptivist. Grammar and language need to be free to evolve, and let’s face it, you can’t stop that evolution. No matter how hard they try, prescriptivists will always, always fail. If someone expects me to use a gender-specific pronoun when the subject’s gender is indeterminate, they’re crazy. If that person wants me not to end my sentences with prepositions, I have a place they can go to. You see what I mean?
• When John asked Jesus whether or not he was Messiah, Jesus sent a surprising message back. Surprising in what he didn’t say, I mean. John was obviously doubting Jesus, but Jesus had no condemnation for him. He didn’t list the number of Torah passages he had fulfilled. He didn’t send a letter with three well-argued points and a rousing conclusion meant to nicely wrap things up. He said, look at what I am doing: the blind can see, the lame can walk, the dead are being raised to life. This if, of course, not the only way Jesus used to bolster the faith of individuals, but is it so hard to believe it should be the same way with us today? Are we the true religion? Look at what we are doing: the poor are being fed, single mothers are being looked after, war-torn countries are being rebuilt, people are being shown the light of the gospel and being invited into the family. Am I wrong in thinking this might be what real religion looks like?

Attribution and License for the above photo.

Two hundred walls, walls of eyes, stone
roots lazily devouring the senescent remainder;
how the mighty have fallen, so close sunward
but so far earthly: when the waxen lips
might melt you find an accidental down-draft.

Your lame still hear.
Your deaf still talk.
Your blind still walk into walls,
the invisible walls of eyes,
judging every move.

Let the mighty hand move,
let him inscribe the sudden blindness,
let your closed lids form the mad letters:
weighed in the balance
and found wanting.