Challenge Tres Rios 2010

This is beat, bruised and bloodied me heading home after I dropped out of the Tres Rios Challenge at kilometer 10 because I lost low gear on my bike.  There's always next year...

Tres Rios Challenge

Quit facebook.

I quit Facebook. Here's why.

In high school and college, they gave us facebooks (actual booklets with pictures of people so you'd learn their names and see their faces) at the beggining of every year.  I had fun with mine, crossing off people who didn't make it throught the year, among other things. 

They were useful and practical.  http://facebook.com, not so much. 

I'm not under the illusion of privacy.  As a web developer I know how crude, as well as how sophisticated, user authentication systems are, and I know that all the data you enter as your own into an application's fields as you sign up will reside in a (hopefully) well designed database schema optimized for data mining.  They are not stored in some magical place rendered invisible to everybody.  Having worked on some pretty sophisticated retargeting systems for an ad network, I know that your data, as well as mine, is out there, somewhere, if you have pretty much ever done everything online, or offline.  This it to say, I didn't quite facebook because of what they might or might not have done with my data.  For me it came down more to what I, and my friends, did with my data on Facebook.

Facebook web application development.  When I joined Facebook, 3 or so years ago, I did so with a developer's curiosity and was deeply rewarded by what I saw. The application kicked ass.  It was highly usable, highly navigable, introducing elements of asynchronic operability which presented users with a level of dynamicity the average user had not yet seen at the time, and it was being done on a massive, scalable and structured deployment.  Facebook was, in my opinion at first more than now, an elegant, well developed, and admirably architected atypical and highly functional web application.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the scale at which I was seeing it.  I urged others to join, and spent hours playing with the application and connecting the dots between what I knew about the technology stack they were using and how they were applying it to the user interface.  Those days are over, Facebook has been reacting to a greater extent than innovating since twitter started gaining traction.

Openness, data portability and ownership. Do you really own your data now that it's in some cloud server who knows where?  That is the question.  During the 90's a couple of competitors owned the general public on the Internet: AOL and Compuserve.  After some time they came to be known as walled gardens.  "Beautiful" enclaves where users could interact and find everything they needed from chat rooms, to classifieds to pseudo-web pages.  I remember seeing ads on the TV that listed a company's URL as well as the AOL Keyword.  Ring any bells?  This is what Facebook is doing now.  It's the new walled garden, and we've come too far to take that many steps back.  The name of the game is openness, data portability, ownership and de-centralization;  none of these are terms Facebook is comfortable with. 

The ideal social networking platform would be more of a system (protocol) with which different sites could integrate, where you would own your information,  do with it what you please, non-privacy issues, and a de-centralized system that feeds updates and other information to the satellite sites that could be the farming thing, or the mafia thing, or the rating thing, or whatever you wouldwant to build as a third party site that could integrate with the open social networking protocol, which by the way, would most likely be free because when you have taken so much investor funding, and you have no clear way on how to generate revenue, all sorts of weird things start happening.  I have had this experience recently.

I have omitted much about Twitter in this post because power users stand close to the view that it is a news aggregator, not social network.

After being away for two weeks I really don't miss it at all.  I won't get to see some pictures, and that is too bad, but I get to manage my friends ad campaigns on twitter for his company so I get to see it about once a week, without my friends on it.

Up and coming.  Facebook's CEO said that their competition was out there and they probably didn't know about it yet.  Here is the list of up and comers as compiled from The New York Times and other publications:

Jezebel, 10,000 Maniacs - unplugged

(download)

To think of my task is chilling. 
To know I was carefully building the mask I was wearing for two years, swearing I'd tear it off. 
I've sat in the dark explaining to myself that I'm straining too hard for feelings I ought to find easily. 
Called myself Jezebel. 
I don't believe. 

Before I say that the vows we made weigh like a stone in my heart. 
Family is family, don't let this tear us apart. 

You lie there, an innocent baby. 
I feel like the thief who is raiding your home, entering and breaking and taking in every room. 
I know your feelings are tender and that inside you the embers still glow. 
But I'm a shadow, I'm only a bed of blackened coal. 
Call myself Jezebel for wanting to leave. 

I'm not saying I'm replacing love for some other word to describe the sacred tie that bound me to you. 
I'm just saying we've mistaken one for thousands of words. 
And for that mistake, I've caused you such pain that I damn that word. 
I've no more ways to hide that I'm a desolate and empty, hollow place inside. 

I'm not saying I'm replacing love for some other word to describe the sacred tie that bound me to you. 
I'm not saying love's a plaything. 
No, it's a powerful word, inspired by strong desire to bind myself to you. 
How I wish that we never had tried to be man and his wife, to weave our lives into a blindfold over both our eyes. 

Sleep Cycle is a cool app for the iPhone/iPod touch.

Placed on your bed on airplane mode so the phone/wifi functionality is off, the accelerometer senses how deep you're sleeping (when you sleep deepest there is little to no movement) and wakes you up when you're sleep is shallowest. You're alarm clock doesn't do this so it may wake you up when you're least ready to be alert and rested. Sleep is based on the Circadian rhythm.                        

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