Me versus The Facebook

So, I live 27°44′34″N 97°24′7″W / 27.74278; -97.40194. It's not a bad place to live if you have millions of dollars in college loans. But I digress. We currently have a 98 year-old mayor that is up for election this year. Okay, he's not 98. I tried to Googleize his age and I got no results. But let's just say that he still thinks the Charleston is the dancing rage of the season.

So, I was a bit of a surprise when my lovely wife dropped this bomb on me..."Did you know Mayor Garrett has a Facebook page?" I believe the kids call that, "WTF?"

How do you know when something in popular culture "jumps the shark"? When "giving DAP", movie quotes and Angela Lansbury are no longer culturally viable. Sadly, I believe Facebook has suffered this critical blow as well.

See, not all technology is bad. Take the Wii for example.

Shall we remember 2004 when we had our version of Coke versus Pepsi play out before our digital eyes? Originally, MySpace specialized in band networking and free publicity to venues and fans while Facebook angled the networking toward college students. These social networking sites made Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe millionaries selling out to NewsCorp while Mark Zuckerberg is fighting off Microsoft and Hong Kong businessmen to keep it's independence.

A mere five years later, I'm off MySpace and my wife is alerting me of new Facebook members eligible for social security.

Now, I don't want to sound rude or disparaging to anyone my parent's age logging into any social networking site. But what ever happened to a phone call and a static web site? I know this is hypocracy at it's finest (Blogspot, LinkedIn, Twitter, anyone?) but I guess the true issue I have with Facebook is that it's lazy and not very safe.

I start with the biblical sin: the static graphical interface can be achieved with simple HTML. The links are simple with no real jazz to them. All you do is write and load on the generated field, and viola...YOU HAVE THE SAME EXACT WEBSITE AS EVERYONE ELSE. Damn, even Twitter will let you change your wallpaper.

Tandem that with the information risk, and you have a recipe for continued problems. In 2005, Facebook suffered an attack with a shell script while currently deactivation issues leave tons of personally identifiable information on servers prone to data mining. And don't even get me started with social engineering and cyberbullying!

Now, octogenarians and city governments want to use this tool? I don't know, it just sounds to me that this was a good idea that has now gone terribly wrong. It's one thing leaving college students to their own devices writing on other "walls" and procrastinating for their exam. It's another thing when grown ups can't establish policy without having to create a new page for their new proposals (just blow up the Memorial Coliseum already!). And then it's absolutely detrimental when the professional workforce is wasting the work day posting updates of how bored they are at work.

And no, I am not joining Facebook. Do what President Obama does and email me.

Before I get to my three things, I like to thank everyone for wishing The Lovely and me a Happy Anniversary. Hopefully, this is enough of an excuse for my recent hiatus. Man, what the hell are you guys going to do when I am gone for Costa Rica? More on that next week. But, in the meantime...

My Three Things:
1) Never, ever let a car dealership say, "Oh, sure, you can borrow this car for the weekend." You might as well buy the freaking car right then and there.
2) Port Aransas is the most underrated beach town in Texas.
3) Why must people insist on scheduling cool events at the exact same date or time? Food and Wine Classic as the same at the ACS Open House as the same as a political fundraiser...that's like scheduling a computer security conference at the same time as SXSW. Whoops.

"Hey, let's be careful out there." Talk later.