This weekend being Thanksgiving here in Canada I’ve had a chance to see a lot of friends and family. One topic that came up a couple times was about Facebook and those who choose not to partake in social media. My sister-in-law mentioned that she was far too busy with everything else in her life to get involved with Facebook. She figures that if someone really needs to get a hold of her that they can pick up the phone.

To me this is a rather hardline stance when it comes to social media, and runs totally contrary to the way I live my life. Choosing to completely ignore social media in 2010 and beyond just seems foolhardy to me. We can look back 10-15 years and look at internet adoption. 15 years ago you would have been on the leading edge to have an internet capable PC. 10 years ago PCs started to be more commonplace and dial-up was beginning to be phased out by high-speed internet connections. 5 years ago you were definitely a dinosaur if you didn’t at least have an email address to correspond with people. I know a few people who pretty much chose to forgo internet usage. They check their email at irregular intervals and are just generally difficult to get a hold of. I rarely see these people anymore and the digital divide is definitely the culprit.

I find I’m hardline the other way when it comes to communication. I will do everything possible to avoid picking up the phone. Sure there are times that the phone is the easiest way to communicate, but I’d probably say 90% of the time it’s not. There are so many other, more efficient ways to get a hold of people. To get a hold of me I’d probably say in this order

1. Email – Pretty much where all my info travels. I get notifications from Facebook and Twitter though email.  Everything is labeled and organized. Spam is filtered.
2. Twitter – Great way to have quick back and forth as I check it frequently.  Great way to actually learn and get to know people and what is going on in their lives.
3. MSN, GTalk etc – While not always the coolest way anymore, if I’m at my computer you can probably quite easily get a hold of me this way
4. Facebook – While I typically reply to Facebook via email, it’s still a decent way to get a hold of me and let me know of upcoming events I might be interested in checking out.
5. Phone – Most obtrusive way to contact me.  While I don’t mind talking to certain people on the phone, I find I dislike it as a whole.  I find I only use the phone when I absolutely have to, like phoning the bank or Rogers which is always a pain.
6. Text Message – I hate text messages.  They cost money above and beyond what I pay for data and buying a plan for the few I might send makes no sense.  Grow up and get a Twitter account if you want to message me in 140 characters or less.

I find most of the things I do in life nowadays channels through social media. If I hear about a new restaurant, it’s probably because someone might have shared their experience through checking in on Foursquare.  Or if I check out a social event like Ignite Waterloo or Democamp Guelph it’s because I heard about it on Twitter.

The reality is my life path is definitely traveling a different direction that that of my sister-in-law.  I find that the people who choose not to engage in social media are definitely being left behind.  I think as time goes on people who ignore social media will find their phones ringing less and less and will be baffled that nobody talks to them anymore.  While it may be harsh, it really will be true.  People are going to have to adapt of they will be left behind by society.

As I’m sure many people have read, Facebook recently made changes to their privacy policies that have got people’s knickers in a knot, and understandably so.  The long and short of what Facebook is trying to achieve is to monetize your content you create via search engine traffic.

On the web traffic is currency and Facebook has a lot of it.  The problem that is inherent with the concept of monetizing Facebook’s traffic is how their user base was built.  Facebook didn’t become this omnipresent internet juggernaut overnight.  They built up from a small site targeted toward university networking to the megalith of a site we know today.  And they did this by building a walled garden community.

Stuff that happened on Facebook is inherently public, but it wasn’t necessarily of public record.  You could always prune back your walled garden, delete content and nobody would be the wiser.  This isn’t the case with the rest of the internet.  Things can get indexed in Google almost as soon as it’s published.  Once it’s published it can be cached by numerous sites, creating a backup should you ever decide to delete your content.  All the images you post with your content end up in Google or Bing image search results.  I find I get a pretty large amount of traffic to my blog looking for images, so I know there is definite value in the hoard of images on Facebook.

Facebook users signed up to use the service under the impression that the site was essentially a personal social network.  This wasn’t a site where you had a public profile, online aliases or anything else to obscure your identity.  The web had long been built on a foundation of obscuring facts about yourself for the sake of personal privacy.  Facebook essentially allowed you to let your guard down and reconnect with family, old friends and acquaintances.  You could share email addresses and phone numbers with your network knowing prying eyes shouldn’t be able to access this information.  You could share pictures of parties or vacations knowing that it is being shared with people you actually know and not online strangers.

The biggest issue at hand here is what I view as a betrayal of Facebook’s 350 million users. The service has essentially reached a crossroads.  They have a very large userbase, but more then likely their growth will have plateaued, given everyone’s Moms/Dads/Aunts/Uncles/Grandparents are now using the service.  Now they’ve reached the point of saturation, the rules are changing.  No longer does Facebook want to be a closed website, they want to take all these notes, wall posts, photos and shared links that you have posted onto the site over the years and turn them into avenues to generate revenue.

The reality of this situation is that it’s not people like myself that are going to get screwed by these changes, it’s the less computer savvy that Facebook has spent years courting.  I went through yesterday and locked down my profile so that there is next to nothing showing up on my profile page.  I have it so that my page doesn’t appear in search engine results.  I had to individually change the permissions of each photo album to be friends only.  You can no longer see who my friends are anymore.  Here’s an article on how to secure your Facebook profile.

I wrote this article mainly to make friends aware of what is actually going on with the new changes.  Log into Facebook and make sure your information is secure.  If you previously hadn’t bothered with your privacy settings it is entirely possible that the new changes may leave certain personal information exposed.

I recently had someone call me out about using essentially Twittering too much on Facebook. I have my Twitter account linked, so that it will publish items as status updates on my Facebook account. To tell you the truth, I was almost shocked it took that long for someone to freak out about it. I do pair down the Twitter noise by excluding @ replies, but I hadn’t accounted for retweets though.

The part that surprised me was the people quickly jumping to my defense on the matter. It just shows the people who are passively lurking, and by extension reading and enjoying the content I pass along. Initially I felt bad about having annoyed one of my Facebook friends and looked to shape up my ways. But as one of my friends pointed out, he could choose to hide my updates and that be the end of it.

The part that got me thinking about this little exchange is the ramifications for Facebook users as things begin to change after Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed. FriendFeed is all about social media aggregation. How many uninitiated users will suffer from data overload as FriendFeed becomes one with Facebook? I guess only time will tell.