Facebook Privacy Scanner

Here's something fun: Facebook Privacy Scanner It's a link to some open source code that you can turn into a bookmark. When you're logged into Facebook, clicking on the link will scan your entire account and check the privacy settings. Although I still intend to severely cull my friends list, for the time being this is useful to know. After I've cut my FB presence down to a level I want, this will still allow me to monitor the public image I display. The only way to have no public information on Facebook is to not have one, of course.

Photo Sharing

A central reason I have stayed with Facebook as long as I have is my intense attachment to the photo albums I've made. These are all the loving work of several hours, each with extensive captioning and tagging. I want there to be a place outside of FB where I can share them the same way, but maintain control over who sees them. From what I've discovered so far, assuring permission a priori to only a select group is only possible if I email each member of that group. The problem is I don't want to bug my friends with announcements of photo uploads. I just want them to have the option of popping over to Picasa or Flickr and being able to access my albums with no difficulty. Also, it seems that if I make any album private, my friends and family will have to create an account at the hosting site, which is an inconvenience, especially given that people already have too many screen names and sites to register for. There may be a way around this if I make only those pictures that are visible on my blog accessible as an album. That way the public content is identical in either place.

I really hope that OpenID can gather some steam. I really like the idea of being able to use one online sign-in procedure wherever you go. If, say, Picasa, were to adopt this, people could sign in to see my albums there but use an extant ID to do so (perhaps from Yahoo! or Livejournal). No need to create a new account.

Facebook Purge: Day 2

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I've begun searching for additional perspectives on quitting facebook. Here we learn about "Facebook Suicide" and the author's reasons for undertaking it. I quite agree with most of her analysis, although the cynic in me wonders if we've always secretly been narcissistic, and that FB hasn't just given us a convenient and public outlet.

I'm still working on establishing a convenient way of doing all that Facebook does without actually using it. If nothing else, Facebook is an easily accessed, centralized clearinghouse of all the information I see fit to share, and a place where I can find interesting stuff, too. Ideally, I will be able to link a newsfeed (Twitter) to some wall-posts (Blogger) to a collection of photo albums (Picasa) to an OpenID profile (Google and Gmail) to the website that I will soon create. All that's left is a way to get a digest of interesting articles my friends dig up. My friends are always posting news stories about politics and languages on FB, and I enjoy seeing those.

In other news, my car is in the shop getting a new timing belt. How do people usually manage day-long car repairs? Was someone supposed to come get me, or was I supposed to sit in the office all day? I took the bus part-way home and then had to walk mile, because the bus system here does not take transfers and I didn't have $6.00 for a day pass. A one way fare is $2.50 and you don't get a transfer?! This repair sets me back $600, but it's better than letting my timing belt snap, and I certainly was due for it. There goes half my tax refund! Good thing I got one!

Peace