Back again. And why?

The initial post or two in the revival will be chatty because I have a lot on my mind. However, the longer I go without saying anything on Facebook (even “liking” anything) the easier it gets. I want to take one thing away from Facebook once I've vented, and that is brevity.

Why am I leaving? First, there was some activist attempt to gin up sympathy for people who had taken over a public wharf in my town and were being told to push off. The suggestion was that they were poor downtrodden immigrants, or poor widdle kids who couldn't go fishing with Daddy. They were immigrants all right, and would have been more than welcome if they hadn't made a godawful mess, hadn't shoved off the real neighbourhood kids who have been swimming off this wharf since forever, and if half or more hadn't been unlicenced professionals trying to cut out the licenced fishermen, whom they also tried to shove off.

I was pleased to see that the campaign was over almost before it began, but it was a classic example of how Facebook, by paying no interest to accuracy, encourages such nonsense. There's nothing like having a personal acquaintance with an issue to show up how worthless is most social media content.

Second, about a year ago I began observing the conflicts (can't call them debates) over organic vs. bio-engineered food. I waited to see which side won me with evidence and style. Those sceptical of organics and supportive of biotechnology won me over with evidence and had a slight edge in class. But my interest inevitably (on Facebook) got me tagged as a potential follower of some of the more toxic pages on the other side. When I politely asked a couple to get my name off their lists, I was inundated with hate mail, and trolled for a while until the fools lost interest. Fortunately, they have the attention span of a dog in a wood full of squirrels. Third, I've been trying to aid my mental health by limiting my exposure to news, and I found that exposure to social media was having the same negative effect on me.

Finally, I was trolled for a perfectly benign bit of humour by one of my own relations, whose sensitivity presumably had been honed to a sharp edge by excessive exposure to social media. That's when I said “fuck this.” So I'm back here, in what is generally my personal echo chamber.

Doomed by unfriending

Sometimes I think we, the world's crazees, represent the last bastion of actual sanity. This is on my mind because, first, I googled how to "unfriend" someone on Facebook. What you get in this thread is enough to convince anyone that one is the last sane person on earth. Look, pilgrims, we are just clicking a button here to remove someone's access to one's information. We are not fighting a duel. Nor, as this item suggests, are we making (necessarily) a political statement that we should consider carefully. We just do not want to communicate with this person any longer. For our own reasons.

I suppose it's part of the warm and fuzzy new Facebook that their Help no longer warns users against unfriending people, suggesting that they can't ever again be friends. Instead, they give a straight answer to the how-to question. Any former suggestions of dire consequences are gone.

The person I unfriended had irritated me several ways: first by ignoring me a number of times and most recently with a piece of tactless comedy that went over several lines. Although it seems like time to end what little was left of the actual friendship, I would probably not have unfriended her were it not for all the thou-shalt-nots. Those are not the best thing to wave in front of a card-carrying contrarian.

Which of these geeks is not like the other?

We awake to yet another foot in the Facebook mouth. There hasn't been time for the full throated denials from Facebook; only the pro forma ones. It will get better.

For those who have been spending time in another dimension, Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook's co-inventor and CEO, and Facebook is one of the galaxy's most successful social networking sites. Zuckerberg is 26, another of those brilliant college dropouts who are the despair of parents trying to get their children a college education. He knows everything--he'll tell you so himself--and especially he knows everything about what his customers want. If those customers suggest that they want something else, such as stronger privacy controls, then Zuckerberg will explain to them how wrong they are, with that air of barely-contained impatience characteristic of young geeks.

The trouble is that this hubristic mindset has more to do with geekdom and early success than it does with age. A. Neil Pappalardo is the founder and CEO of arguably one of the most successful medical software companies in the world, and was also co-developer of the MUMPS computer language. Pappalardo is about 68, one of those brilliant MIT graduates who sets a good example for anxious parents. So much for the differences. Like Zuckerberg, Pappalardo also knows everything. Having run his company for over 40 years, he no longer has to tell anyone that he knows everything: he has an army of employees ready to spread the word. However, like Zuckerberg, he has customers who occasionally say that they want something different from his company's products, and Pappalardo's legions have to tell them that they're wrong and Neil is right.

Those acquainted with both find it easy to think they're listening to the young Neil Pappalardo when they hear Mark Zuckerberg, and that they're seeing Zuckerberg in 40 years when they see Neil. The idea of an increasingly patriarchal Facebook, managed solely according to the whims of its CEO, is enough to freeze the blood.

When you're 26, your company is barely six years old, and most of your customers are individuals, you can get away with telling them what they want...for a while. Pappalardo's example suggests that in some cases you can get away with it for a long time. While the world inside IT changes very slowly, in terms of attitude and culture, the world of the users changes much more rapidly. I recently heard a persuasive presentation that the "next big thing" in IT is going to be products that are intelligible to users and that respond to customer needs.

Whether you're 26 or 68, that's an idea worth considering.