I don’t need that.

I can’t speak for others, but I’m no extrovert. No matter how many people I may be Facebook friends with, the reality is that I don’t maintain relations with that many people. What’s more, I’m not convinced that you regularly talk to each and every one of your 130 friends. I’m fairly certain that you have a much smaller circle of people you actually spend time with, and you friended the rest so you could have an easy point of contact with them on the off chance you needed it. Not so they could see how many points you got on the last game you played on Kongregate, or leaf through your embarrassing Pandora musical choices, or know when you’re out of the house.

So what do I need a social backbone for? Nothing. I certainly don’t want it to constantly increase the amount of information it deliberately leaks. And thus, I propose we move our social networking activity out of entities like Facebook, and into ones we control ourselves. I propose we decentralize social networking, since if sharing is the social norm, we’re perfectly capable of sharing only to whom we care about.

You see, we all have the power to make our own social networks. And I’m not talking about something like Ning–I’m talking about a little site that you only reveal to a few specifically chosen people, and no one else. That is, a tiny communication platform where you know everyone else there, and where, since the entire site is secret in the first place, there will never be the possibility of anyone seeing something you didn’t want them to see.

As it happens, I did just that about six months ago with a small group of friends, and it’s working beautifully. No, I won’t link it here–that would defeat the purpose! I will, however, explain how I did it, and how you can do the same. It’s really not hard at all, and can be done by anyone in their spare time. All you need is a WordPress blog and your friends.

The WordPress P2 Theme

I assume WordPress needs little introduction. If you don’t know what it is, it’s blog software. That’s really it. Except, it’s extremely easy to configure and use, it’s open source, and it’s malleable enough to shape into almost any kind of content management system you can imagine–from webcomics to artist portfolios to forums. We’re after something like the latter.

The P2 theme should look familiar to anyone who’s used Twitter. It’s got an entry box at the top for typing out a quick post or uploading or linking in pictures or videos, and below it aggregates all the recent posts and displays threaded comments under them. It even brings up other users’ posts and comments in real time as they get posted. And, unlike Twitter, there are no character limits (since, after all, it’s really just a blog).

That, to be honest, is really all there is to it. I won’t bore you with the details of how to set up a WordPress blog–if you want to do it yourself, it’s pretty easy to just go to wordpress.com and install the theme in the theme browser. It’s also not hard to set one up in your own web hosting, though that takes a bit more technical knowledge. (If you’ve already got a domain and webhosting set up, you can even install it in a subdirectory.)

So go out there and make one! And of course, no need to tell me about it. Unless I’m your friend and all.

This most recent change consists of a revamp for Facebook’s already-substantial privacy settings. This change didn’t actually affect anyone’s settings who didn’t tell it to; users were greeted with an unavoidable menu asking them if they wanted to keep their old settings or switch them to new, simplified privacy categories–the default of which in a number of them was “Everyone”.

This is, to be perfectly fair, not something I really have a problem with. While “Everyone” was preselected for some users (UPDATE: apparently not all, since for some at least, it was set to Original Settings), they gave you all the information you need to decide whether that was actually a good thing. Plus, I get why they’re doing it; they want all the data they have on their users to be available to search engines and marketers so they can monetize it, and so they can position themselves as the search result that people might want to come up on Google searches for their users’ names. Monetizing profile data without incurring the wrath of privacy advocates is something they’ve been doing for years through, among other things, their own targeted advertising network (the one that’s known for selling sex to men and weight loss to women), the ill-conceived and ill-fated Beacon, Facebook Connect, and the notorious ads that use friend connections to make it appear as though a user’s friends endorse a product.

Many of Facebook’s users tend to forget that Facebook is neither free nor intended as a public service. They’re in the game to make money, and the data they’ve amassed on their users is worth a fortune to the right people. With that in mind, I don’t really blame them for encouraging their users to make their profile data public. (As long as, y’know, they’re not doing anything shady on the side in complete violation of their privacy policy.)

On the other hand, I imagine many of their users neither take the time to learn about how far their profile data can go nor care about the issue, and might very well absently click their way through the menu without thinking about what “Everyone” actually means. Frankly, I have little sympathy for those users, but the EFF disagrees. I would be quite interested in statistics on how many users actually changed their settings to Everyone as a result of this menu–those would presumably be the ones who just didn’t want to be bothered and thought “yeah, whatever”.

It just goes to show: as always, there is no replacement for a smart user. Internet companies will monetize however they can. It’s up to users to decide where they want their data to go, or if they even care.

Edited: Fixed a minor typo. Also, I’ve received reports that Everyone wasn’t always preselected, which is quite significant for the “yeah, whatever” cases.