It’s all really interesting food for thought. Hmm.

The current rather emabrassing rush to Facebook et al by the 20-30’s has been done in a desperate self-fulfillment frenzy of – frankly – sadness. I have close friends who just split up after 10 years of marriage. They are both furiously Facebooking their new single lives…sadly, their nearly-teenage children can follow along online. WTF prompts people to do this? There’s reams of dissertation in there.

I’ve always held that you only have ~5 true friends at any one stage of your life. These are people who will pick you up drunk & dribbling at 3am, clean you up and put you to bed. And you’d do the same for them.

The idea that Facebook gets you more ‘friends’ is just laughable. And sad.

For my money, Facebook and other more fringe apps like Kyte still don’t offer the level of protection & configurability to make me a confident sharer of personal info. And worse for Facebook, there’s the ominous shadow of how exactly they are using your info to help out advertisers etc. No wonder Newscorp are interested.

I’d love to feel happy & safe sharing our family lifestream online/mobile with the small handful of close friends and relatives who would be genuinely interested. But none of the current services/apps out there give me the confidence.

£0.02.

Mike

This point was raised at the Future of Mobile conference back in November.

Someone said something along the lines of:

“Given the applications/functionality of today’s phones, how easy would it be to create a program that would read my calendar and my GPS to let party X know where I am, what I’m doing and more importantly, where my kids are and what time they finish school etc…”

I’m not into scaremongering – not by a long shot (I’ll leave that to the Daily Mail) – but yes, Data Protection *is* changing.. and it’ll be next generation that defines it.

Currently, the way recruitment works is that employers want folks with a spotless past, no skeletons in the cupboard and someone who can ’stand for their brand’. Except that those skeletons that could previously be hidden from public view, are now very public and very searchable. Our future leaders have already exposed themselves with their embarassing stories of nights of excess and drug-fuelled parties on social networking sites. Their views on life, which over time will no doubt change, are there in black and white.

So how is Joe Public going to feel about this? Will we still expect our future leaders to be blemish free or will we (as in the older generation) be accepting of this change? Will the recruiters of the future be tolerant to this kind of background if the candidate can do the job properly. Will the lines between public and private life be blurred? And in turn, how will all this affect employment and drug legislation in the future?

I don’t have the answers, but I think about this *a lot* and in fact, I wrote about it last year too http://technokitten.blogspot.com/2007/07/some-thoughts-on-social-media.html.

Thanks for thinking about it too!