Telepocalypse by Martin Geddes: I solemnly do declare

November 09, 2007

I solemnly do declare

I hereby do notify the world that I shall not join any form of online service that has any of the following features:

Requires me to work out who my friends are.
Asks me to approve you as a friend before we can communicate.
Sends me an email to tell me someone didn’t send me an email.
Wants me to register before I can contribute.
Wants me to write a constant narrative of my life just in case someone unspecified wants to read it.
Expects me to manually give my availability or location for any reason.
Endorses products to others based using my name.

Coming next:

Any non-commercial site that doesn’t use OpenID and wants me to create yet another username and password. (And you can guess which qualifier I’ll be dropping after that.)

Yes, my Facebook account is closed. (And if you invite me to join a Facebook group, I won’t.)

Posted by Martin Geddes at 04:41 PM

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Comments

that first one "Requires me to work out who my friends are" may deserve some more explanation. web applications that are built from the ground up with privacy in mind (none of the popular ones that i know of) allow members to control the privacy of their data by declaring these relationships. it's only these sites which prioritize mindshare over privacy that don't add any value by requiring us to work out who are friends are.

cheers,
tom

Posted by: at November 9, 2007 10:22 PM

Way to GO! (but lets face it, are you "the broadcast generation"?)

Posted by: at November 10, 2007 09:17 AM

Add to your list: allows people I don't know to ask me for an endorsement of their work. This is a nasty, unremovable feature of Linked In so I finally told them to delete my details and cancel my account.

I am still on FB though and it's highly irritating, especially the stupid ads in my feed which advertise California car insurance. Never mind that my profile says I live in Amsterdam.

If this is their idea of "targeted, relevant" advertising (that supports their $15B valuation), it's pathetic.

Posted by: at November 13, 2007 05:55 PM

trackback: http://blog.iclutton.com/2007/11/convergence-divergence-and-social-web.html

Posted by: at November 14, 2007 05:37 PM

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