Listen Live
K97.5 Featured Video
CLOSE

How many of you sometimes find yourself feeling a little addicted to some social networking application. My personal favorite is Facebook and no matter how much I try to pull back it seems impossible. Anything done is ok as long as it’s done in moderation right? Well all the constant changes in Facebook are nerve wrecking but what do they really mean behind what the average person may recognize? The social network modified its policies for handling user data once again as part of its F8 conference and release of the Open Graph API, and ever since it became clear that more information is being set as public by default and more is being shared with third parties, concerned Facebook users have been on jittery alert

Is Facebook unstoppable. It is no doubt a powerful machine with an increasing 400 million current users. People typical log on to a social network up to a total of five plus hours per day. Seeing it laid out like that seems pretty bad because surely time could be put to be use. the coalition of U.S. senators petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to rein in social networks’ handling of user data a bit will be effective, and Facebook will be forced to stabilize the iteration of its service a bit; this, in turn, could mean that its lightning-speed innovation could be curbed as red tape and roadblocks go up

This Web business built by a few college students into a sprawling creature that seems capable of sharing anything with anyone anywhere? Very, very slowly. But when something big happens, people start to notice the small stuff that they wish they’d seen earlier. Concerned Facebook members are now acting like the social network has grown into something beyond their control, that even lawmakers might not be able to do much good, that the company is acting more like an unpredictable force of nature than a business run by, well, humans.

On Wednesday, one small but alarming security hole was found in Facebook; the company attributed it to an engineering bug, and patched it. On Thursday, PC World detailed that Facebook was “secretly adding” third-party applications to user profiles, something that the company once again attributed to a bug and said that it had been fixed. Investor-pundit Paul Kedrosky and fanboy idol Peter Rojas, former editor of Engadget and co-founder of GDGT, both announced on Thursday that they were deactivating their Facebook profiles.

The social network can credit a big portion of its success to this ability and willingness to keep changing while some of its industry brethren–MySpace, Digg–kept products relatively static and are now suffering the consequences. Living your life  on the Web and entrusting personal data to social-media services like Facebook means that you’re agreeing to colonize a product that’s subject to change and unexpected error. This is true for many services besides Facebook, too. Twitter’s shown hints of major expansion plans.

Source: