Shyzer.com

When I was in Australia last year, my main source of communication and news was through weekly 4,000 word e-mails between myself and Fellner. In fact, we had so much fun with them, that we kept it going when he went to Ecuador and even now while he’s in Austria. Now, when you’re writing thousands and thousands of words each week back and forth, it’s not hard to imagine that we cover a lot of ground. And sometimes, I feel as if we’re always one step ahead of everybody, talking about things that only we seem to care about that suddenly a few weeks or months later become big news.

And the latest e-mail I sent him was no different.

Somewhere along the line we started talking about Stephen Colbert and his comedy bit about Wikipedia and how susceptible it is. In fact, here’s what I said:

But Colbert was proving a good point. In this day and age, some people are starting to see information as being TOO readily available for our own good, leading to more false truths than before. Here’s what I mean. In 1990, if I were given an assignment of writing an essay on ancient mummies, I would most likely go to the library and use various books / encyclopedias. I trusted the sources because they were edited, read over by many people, and hopefully the bad ones were weeded out through the process of not even being printed. But now, not so… We don’t teach kids (or adults for that matter) how to verify information. We simply jump on Google, hit search (and believe me, most people don’t even know how to properly search for info. I mock Clay almost daily for being a Bad Googler) and then we just click the first few links that pop up. But who wrote what’s on those links? Who fact checked them? Who proofread them? And who deemed them the most reliable? Google? Please, they can’t possibly verify everything they index. So now, we are left simply assuming the info we find on the Internet is real.

Anybody can make a page that looks real and legit and then pump it full of false info. I could make a page about all the wars America has fought in, buy a legit domain like AmericanWars.com and then fill it with propaganda or false info. It happens all the time and yet John and Jane Doe who come in from Google don’t know it’s false.

Bottom line: I love the Internet, but it’s time we start teaching people how to use it. It’s become such a staple in our life, yet problems like this and countless others out there are jeopardizing its true potential.

So where am I going with this? What does people not knowing how to use the Internet tie into this post? Well, with Facebook.

Yesterday, they introduced a new mini-feed system that updates you on everything you’re friends have done, from relationship status to when they comment on other people’s profiles to just about every change they make to their account.

And people are absolutely livid.

Anti mini-feed groups are popping up every minute. In fact, the biggest one is gaining thousands of new members by the hour. Last night they were at 70,000 members, now they are already over 100K. People are screaming that it’s an invasion of their privacy, that they don’t want other people to know when they’ve updated such and such, and many are threatening to quit and delete their profiles if the new features aren’t removed. Some are even saying this is going to create stalkers and creepy activities now.

But all I can is laugh. This is far from an invasion of privacy. The only people who can see the mini-feed are people who you are friends with, which means they could see all the changes you made anyways. Sure, they wouldn’t have all the information aggregated into one nice little area for them, but if somebody was hell-bent on stalking you before, they could have easily done so by going around and checking people’s profiles manually to see what activity you’d done. Creepy? Sure. But the conditions for it existed long before these new changes, so don’t act like this is anything new.

It’s funny to me how people ignore the threats of the Internet until they are staring it down the barrel. All it took was Facebook implementing this little feature to get people riled up and have attention focused on the fact that people tend to put too much information about themselves out there on the Internet. It would be great if the Facebook team came out in a few days and said “Gotcha! We simply wanted to prove to y’all that you’re putting too much information out there on the net. Maybe in the future you’ll be a little more careful.” But I don’t give them that much credit for trying to pull off an educational prank.

Yes, Facebook does need to have this feature as optional. They need to make it so that if I want to turn it off, I can. But they aren’t doing anything wrong, much less illegal. You are leaving those comments. You are uploading those pictures. You are changing your profile and inserting too much information. And hopefully Facebook has just made you realize it.

Now if I could just get you to realize how much of the crap on Google and Wikipedia isn’t true…

Eh, screw it. I’m going to mess around on Facebook some more. For, you see, I’ve decided to have fun with the new features. I’ve now changed my profile to the picture below and am going around Facebook asking people in creepy messages if they want to be friends. Some of the responses so far have been hilarious.