Facebook’s lame profile interests overhaul

Just because I don’t want a dog humping my leg doesn’t mean I’m not a dog person.  Likewise, I enjoy Facebook, but I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg humping my leg.  That’s the feeling I got today when my Facebook profile prompted me to convert my listed interests into links to Pages.  This article explains the back story pretty well.

Previously, you were free to list whatever interests, movies, books, etc. you wanted in freeform text.  Typically, a comma-delimited list, but you could use semi-colons, linebreaks, smilies, a huge run-on word, it did not matter.  You could type in morse code if you wanted.  Freedom is a wonderful thing.  Each item would turn into a hyperlink that would list others with that same interest (a fruitless search if you typed in nonsense, but no one used this anyway…)

I develop databases for a living.  While I wish the joys of freedom upon everyone, I do know that if you want to collect useful data, you need to restrict data entry somehow.  For instance, if you want to collect addresses, you’d dig yourself an expensive hole to parse your way out of if you offer users a freeform text field to type their entire address into.  Instead, you create a couple fields for street address, a field for city, a field for state/province, and so forth.  Taking things further, you limit states/provinces to a list of valid choices.  The point is if you want to do anything with that data, you need it to be clean.  You can’t have users enter a postal code of "I LIVE ON A CLOUD ~~~ LA LA LA".

We all freely use and enjoy Facebook.  We know that in order for Facebook to provide this service at no cost to its users, they must generate revenue with ads and marketing.  I am not naive about that, nor am I super secretive about my interests (heck, I host my own website and fill it with personal musings for the entire internet to read!)  There is, however, a line that may be crossed that is the difference between playing frisbee with your dog on the beach and your used car salesman’s dalmatian mounting your knee and going to town.  In Facebook land, that line is crossed when I can no longer list "Tuning into NPR with a robotic lobster" as an interest, and am forced to conform en masse to data-minable community page links, where we are nothing but atoms in the crystal lattice of Facebook’s analytic marketscape.

So I deleted my Facebook account, right?  Of course not.  I keep in touch with lots of people this way, and have reconnected with many people I probably would not have otherwise.  But I did remove all my interests.  It’s just not fun to list them there anymore.  I list plenty of information about myself here on this website, and it is spidered and tracked by Google and Bing and Yahoo and probably the NSA.  I don’t care about that.  Like Frank Sinatra, I can do it my way.  Mark Zuckerberg can subscribe to my RSS feed and track me to his heart’s content.  The whole point is that while I choose to share some of my personal information online, I am still in charge of it.  To have it co-opted and abused is dehumanizing and leg-humpy.  That’s not fun.

I may be in a minority of people who actually care about this stuff.  How often is criticism like this dismissed with statistics about "most users" preferences?  That’s fine.  However, within my own skin lies a dictatorship, and it has thusly decreed my opinion.