Jason Calacanis has this mailing list called Jason Nation that I am a subscriber of, and today on his latest email, he declared that his going to quit Facebook.  What is interesting for me is that, even though he practically slammed Zuckerberg and his Facebook, at the most recent TWIT podcast, when asked if he was planning to quit Facebook, he said he’s not sure.

Well now, in this latest email Jason declared that this Friday, 21st of May, he will broadcast the deletion of this Facebook account, live on this This Week In Startups show.

After a slew of other Tech Pundits leaving Facebook, Jason is the latest, but my guess is, he won’t be the last.

I am republishing Jason email here in its entirety (thanks for the permission Jason!) so you can read it yourself and comment on it.

My favorite lines though are as follows:

Did I sign up for Facebook and give you my personal information so you
could give it to third parties WITHOUT my permission? Uhhh…. no.

We signed up with Facebook to share photos and updates with our
friends and families. You duped and double-crossed us by giving *your*
partners *our* private information so you could begin your world
domination plans one Javascript include at a time.

I agree 100%.

Date: May 19th 2010
JasonNation Members: 23,286 emails strong
Location: Mahalo HQ, Santa Monica
Republishing: Republish anywhere (with header/footer)
Subscribe/Unsub: www.jasonnation.com
Some exciting news: http://tcrn.ch/bR35Xu
============================

JNation,

I’ve decided that this Friday at 1 pm Pacific, I will broadcast the
deletion of my Facebook page live on the Internet. (Watch it here:
http://bit.ly/bATQjU)

Simply put, I no longer trust Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg with my information.

Additionally, Facebook has become a waste of time for me. Every minute
I put into Facebook is a minute I will never get back. It’s time I
could have spent writing one of these emails to you guys, finding new
startups to invest in, working on Mahalo.com (almost profitable!) or
spending time with my family.

Facebook is a Ponzi scheme run by a very bad actor. The best way to
express our discontent with Mark Zuckerberg is to simply walk away.

We trusted Zuckerberg with our personal information and he has abused
that trust over and over again. He won’t even come forward and discuss
the issue with anyone in the industry–including his own users!
c
Question: What kind of CEO gets slammed like Zuckerberg has in the
last week and doesn’t make themselves available to discuss the issue
with the press or users?

Answer: A guilty one.

You call this a gift?
================
In a final insult, Facebook lackey Tim Sparapani said this week: “The
flip side of this privacy story… is that we have customized and
individualized every single website out there for people, if they
choose to have it. That’s an extraordinary gift to the public.”

Really?

Did I sign up for Facebook and give you my personal information so you
could give it to third parties WITHOUT my permission? Uhhh…. no.

We signed up with Facebook to share photos and updates with our
friends and families. You duped and double-crossed us by giving *your*
partners *our* private information so you could begin your world
domination plans one Javascript include at a time.

Essentially, Facebook is reselling our data in order to get websites
to add the “Like” button. It may not be a cash transaction yet, but it
is clearly quid pro quo. If you want to give the world a gift, how
about letting us export our own data?

Question: If you don’t allow users to export their own data, but you
do allow your partners to suck it down instantly–and for all
time–what does that say about your intent?

Answer: It says your intent is bad.

NOTE: Hey Sparapani, the super savvy Danny Sullivan F.C.Y.A. (look it
up!): Facebook did not create the personalized web
(http://bit.ly/9hZQop).

Facebook alternatives
====================
If you’re tired of Facebook’s games, I suggest that you use the
following services: Twitter.com for Updates, Flickr.com for Photo
Sharing and Geni.com for your family tree. Those three services are
much better for their individual functions (updates, photos and family
connections) than Facebook!

That leaves casual games, the only piece for which I don’t have a
really good recommendation (besides getting a sick iPad and playing
WeRule!)

Zynga, makers of Mafia Wars and Farmville, knows they can’t trust
Zuckerberg and they going to have all their games off-site this year.
Sure they signed a five-year pack with Facebook this week, but that
must have been driven by Facebook desperate not to lose them. My guess
is Pincus got them to take only 10% of the virtual currency avalanche,
in exchange for their blessing on Facebook’s standard 30% rake.

Zynga will also start a social gaming network, basically Facebook
without the photo sharing, later this year I’m sure. Pincus is way to
smart to get Zuckerpunched.

If only Evan Williams would step up and have the Twitter team build
(private) groups, photo hosting, video hosting and support for Zynga’s
games, we would actually have a place to move to.

Twitter needs to create a viable alternative to Facebook this year.
Twitter has a leader you can trust; Facebook does not. You can do it
Twitter…. Step up!

Three ways to “leave” Facebook
====================
If you’re going to join me (and folks like Leo Laporte and Peter
Rojas) in leaving Facebook, please consider recording yourself doing
so. Post that video to YouTube saying “I deleted/deactivated my
Facebook page!”

As we’ve discussed, there are better services for you to use from
companies you can trust.

I suggest doing one of three things below with your Facebook account
*after* you back it up.

[ Note: Before taking these steps, I suggest downloading your photos
manually and/or trying Backupify's beta Facebook backup service--which
is free. www.backupify.com. I'm an angel investor in this amazing
company.]

1. Just stop using Facebook: Don’t log in, don’t republish your tweets
to Facebook and don’t update your status. Turn off all your photos.
This is a basic step that will also get you a lot time back for the
rest of your life. Try NOT logging into Facebook for three days and
see how much better your life is–I’m sure it will be! Take your
“Facebook time” and use it to actually ask a friend or family member
how they are doing. Take the dog or your kids (or yourself!) for a
walk.

The fact is, Facebook sends only a dozen folks to a link when I post
it. Compare that to hundreds to thousands of people clicking through
on Twitter (on a CTR basis Twitter is 10-20x Facebook!). Also, the
content on Twitter it typically valuable to me. The content on
Facebook tends to be “I’m playing this game” or someone “liking”
something inane. Get off Facebook and do something more productive.
Nothing important happens on Facebook–nothing.

2. Deactivate your account: This renders your account dormant, but you
can still log in at any time and “wake it up” again. Bear in mind,
your information is still stored on Facebook. They still have your
data. Having said that, there is no harm in trying this either…
Deactivate for the rest of the month and see what June 1st feels like
after you wean yourself off the Facebook crack. Just two or three
clicks and you can do it: http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

3. Delete your account: This deletes everything from Facebook–though
I’m not sure it removes your data from their partners sites and I’m
not sure how long they keep your data on backup drives. I’m hearing
conflicting reports, so if you know (or work inside Facebook and have
411), please ship it in confidence to me! If you’re done with
Facebook, don’t delay. Just do it! Those friends from high school will
Google you and find your Twitter account if it’s at all important. :-)
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Conclusion
===========
I don’t think Facebook is going away, but if they see 100 people turn
their accounts off every day, then 1,000, then some day 10,000, they
are going to start taking the issue more seriously. Good people of the
Internet should stand up for what is right and send a clear message to
Facebook: we don’t trust you, so we can’t participate in your service.

Questions:
1. Does Facebook provide any value to you?
2. Can Twitter or Zynga become viable alternatives to Facebook?
3. Are you considering leaving Facebook?
4. Rank, in order, the most loathsome companies and why: Goldman
Sachs, Facebook, BP Oil.
5. I will be in New York City next week for TechCrunch Disrupt. See you there!

Best regards,

Jason

—————–
—————–
—————–
—————–

Some housekeeping:

1. Mahalo is looking for developers! We use cutting-edge technologies
like Cassandra and Django, but you don’t have to have worked with
those before to join our team. Nope, we hire people based on how we
think they will “fit our culture.” Our culture is one of hard work,
dedication, resourcefulness, resiliency and is filled with positive
and quixotic individuals. You will not survive in a company like this
unless you are absurdly hard working, but if you are you will
immediately be given a ton of responsibility. You’ll also get to work
in a pure meritocracy, where people rise and fall with their
contribution–not their age or ability to suck up to the boss. We love
hiring folks outside of Los Angeles and bringing them to live in Santa
Monica. So, if you want to work for the next three or four years at
Mahalo and crush it send me your resume and cover letter. If you would
like to take it easy, phone it in and not get taken out of your
comfort zone send me your resume and I will forward it to a BDC (big
dumb company). :-)

2. The Open Angel Forum is booming! We’re coming to Boston in June,
and London and Seattle shortly after that. If you know of any angel
investors in these cities send them to krute@openangelforum.com.
Details at www.openangelforum.com.

3. TechCrunch50 is, sadly, not happening this year. However, as the
creator of TechCrunch50 I will be marching on and launching 50
companies over two days in early 2011. Please bookmark
www.thelaunchconference.com for more details.

4. We just had the CEO of Groupon, Andrew Mason, on This Week in
Startups. He was great!
http://thisweekin.com/announcements/twist-52-with-andrew-mason/

5. I will be at the Wall Street Journal’s amazing D Conference for the
fifth year in a row–and three years after launching Mahalo! Looking
forward to seeing everyone there and sharing some big news. :-)

6. Having done eight angel investments this year I’m only going to do
two more I think. Those startups will, most-likely, come in through
the Open Angel Forum. The best way to pitch me on an idea is to submit
your company to OAF or send me a link to your product. I don’t invest
in products that are not built already (why would you when you can
invest in products that have been built is my thinking).

7. I’m working on the book proposal after getting a bunch of
interesting offers. What would you want to hear about if I did a book?

8. If you are interested in pitching a show for ThisWeekIn.com please
send it to TWI’s creative director Lon Harris at lon@mahalo.com. I
don’t have any day-to-day involvement in the company. Feel free to cc
me of course.

———
Jason McCabe Calacanis
902 Colorado Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90401
jason@calacanis.com
www.twitter.com/jason
www.blippy.com/jason

Tell me, are you going to quit Facebook too?

Bytheway, if you want to subscribe to this mailing list, you can visit JasonNation.com and register yourself there.

First the ‘River of Stream‘, then the Public Username, and NOW … yes … the Public Status Update !  I don’t care what people say, but this Facebook’s Twitter Phobia, as one commenter in this ReadWriteWeb post (where I heard this news) mentioned, has finally reached its ‘climax’.  It’s really interesting to watch the mighty Walled-Garden that was once a sanctuary (or a prison) for many, bits by bits comes crumbling down with every moment passed, as if it were Berlin Wall itself.

The only problem is, who’s got the key to the gate?

What’s the deal?

So what’s the deal this time?  What will change is that, all the status updates, the links, the photos and videos you share will potentially be visible to the people outside Facebook, member or not.  Of course, you will have a choice ‘not to share’ these updates to the world.  Facebook will add a privacy options drop-down menu on the status update box, which will enable you to control who can access this information.

My question is, what Facebook will put as the default access?  ReadWriteWeb and some of the commenters on the original Facebook post seem to think that the ‘Everyone’ option will be the default option.  If this is true, then I think Facebook is about to commit its biggest Social Media suicide!  Imagine that one day, your status updates, your late-night party photos and your oh-not-so-flattering videos, suddenly get blasted all around the Cyberspace.

Now, I’ve read the announcement post a couple of times, and I couldn’t seem to find any references where it says that Facebook will do such a thing, and I really hope that they won’t repeat Twitter’s mistake.

What would great is if the default option is user-definable, maybe via one of the Privacy Options.  This way users will have a complete control on how they want their updates to be visible by default, and still have the option to choose other options in those odd times.

Another thing that I’ve read there is that Facebook will utilize the concept of followers, which means exactly like you think it is :)  Here is what Facebook said regarding this functionality:

Additionally, when you add a new friend, you’ll begin to start seeing posts they have set to “Everyone” before they have confirmed you as a friend.

Data Miners Heaven

The thing is, these public updates will not appear just like that, somebody/something needs to ‘harvest‘ this data and ‘spit‘ them back to us.  Somebody like, say, Google :)

They key here is, whether Facebook will let anybody do just that, and just like the RWW article says, whether Facebook would provide an API (free or paid) to enable other entities to make use of this data.

I think Facebook should ‘open this last gate’ of its Walled-Garden, because what’s the point of having public updates if nobody can’t ever find it!  Heck, even right now we can’t even find our own updates!

Think about all those wonderful 3rd party apps that came out from Twitter opening up its API.  Of course there will be many mediocre or even crappy ones, but the point is openness fuels creativity and innovation, and we really need a lot of those.

I won’t blame Facebook if they keep the gate closed (or at least selling very expensive key), because this sense of privacy, the feeling of being protected, is one of the major reason why people love Facebook so much.  I was actually a bit surprise when I read the comments on the announcement post that many of them were actually happy with this change, in fact some of them said that it’s about time Facebook does this (huh?).

Nevertheless, let’s hope that Facebook learns some lessons from its peers and do the right thing.

I’m watching right now a Live Streaming from Facebook Technology Tasting Live Event (thanks to Scoble), and just managed to caught the end of a presentation by Facebook about their new Desktop Air Client. Seem that they don’t want to be left behind by others (like Seesmic and Tweetdeck), so they are making their own.

I managed to download and installed the app, and basically, it’s a desktop app where you can check your News Feed and your Wall Status (it’s auto updated), as well as update your status.  It’s minimal I know, but I hope they will keep releasing update to add new features.  It would be great to have a desktop app that does everything that we can do currently on the web.

Here is a screenshot from the app running on my Mac:

Not long time ago, my favourite Twitter Desktop App, Tweetdeck, had a new beta version released.  In this release, one of the new feature was the integration with Facebook.  This means that you can now opt to send your Twitter updates to Twitter and Facebook at the same time.

This kind of,  so-called cross-posting, is not new in Social Media platform. Some other apps have already had this feature for a long time; Ping.fm and Hellotxt.com spring to mind.  But these are all third-party applications, that built their service on top of the API provided by corresponding social media services.

Recently, we’ve seen moves from popular Social Media services, to provide cross-posting feature that is built into the platform itself, or at least with a bit of help from other helper app.  So now, you can have a setting which will auto-post your status on one Social Media platform to other supported services:  Facebook to Twitter, Twitter to Facebook, Plurk to Facebook, Plurk to Twitter, Twitter to FriendFeed, FriendFeed to everything else (and back to FriendFeed) :)

The whole thing is a nightmare.

A few months ago, one Twitter friend whom also using FriendFeed (FF) discovered that FF has a feature to publish his FF activities to Twitter, so he innocently (as we all do) turned this feature on, posted a couple of Tweets to test the link and went away.  What he forgot was that he also set FF to share his Twitter updates on his FF timeline.

As you can imagine, the result is catastrophic, as both FF and Twitter kept feeding the same Tweets to each other again and again and again, created a feedback loop and flooded both his timelines (FF and Twitter) with the duplicate Tweets.  His Twitter followers started to get (very) annoyed and asked him to turn the feature off, but because he wasn’t around at that moment, the requests looked as if they were got ignored. The crowds revolted, as the feedback tweets came more often. Some followers immediately unfollowed, though some others were patient enough to wait.  By the time he came back and  check his timeline, it was a total mess. Obviously he apologised immediately and turned off the feature right away, but unfortunately the damage had been done.  Some people whom less forgiving, might had, in a fit of anger, said some nasty things towards him. At the end, he got very upset with the whole thing and did an equivalent of  Twitter Suicide.

Similar thing happened to me when I discovered that Plurk provided a new feature to cross-post my Plurks to Facebook.  I turned this feature on, and for a while my Plurks were auto-posted to my Facebook wall.  One of my Facebook friend one day sent me a message that he was impressed reading my wall posts although he didn’t have a clue what ‘Plurk this’ and ‘Plurk that’ meant (because the wall post contains a link to the original Plurk item).

This really got me thinking, you know …  this cross-posting, it’s bad, really bad.

Here are why:

1. The generated posts resulted from this multi-posts are adding even more noise to the place (read: the tube) that is already so noisy we need Google to sort them out. They are of the same post, sent to ‘many’ different places, often to the same people, multiple times.  It’s a total waste of bandwidth.

2. The original context of the post is lost.  This is true especially when you post your status update from a particular platform and cross-post it to other services.  These updates are usually created within a certain context (e.g. answering someone’s question), for a certain environment (e.g. your Facebook family). By the time these updates appear on other platform’s timeline, the context are lost, they won’t make any sense what so ever to the people who reads the updates (your followers). And after a while, they become nuisance at best, or worst, upsetting, at which point your followers would promptly leave.

3. The worst of all these, is that cross-postings don’t generate conversation, the post are non-reciprocal.  Unless you intend to follow up your cross-post, it will become just a one-way broadcast update; which is fine, if that was the context for which the post was originally created.  But, as the point above points out, more often than not, we create this post with intention of having conversation with our ‘network’.  Again, it will greatly annoy your followers, when they realize that they can’t join the conversation that you’ve created, even if they have something to say, because they know that you are not there listening.  I personally have experienced this many times, and every time this thing happens I get furious, as I realize that I can’t say anything back.

What I am trying to say here is, it’s fine to do cross-posting as long as you do it in consideration of the others (your followers). If you want to do it with the intention of just to broadcast, then you should warn your followers that this is what you are doing, and that you are not going to follow up your posts.  This way, at least we can ‘mute’ you :)
If you are planning to engage in some conversations, then you should turn off all auto cross-post from your platforms.  Use third-party apps that are capable of cross-posting, when you really want to do it, but remember to follow it through. I often cross-post between Twitter and Plurk whenever I find a useful link that I think my followers would like, but after I do it, I always check both places to anticipate any conversation that may follow from it.

That is what I call ‘Responsible Cross-Posting‘.

Please think more about your followers and be more considerate.

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