Ryan Singel at Wired writes an article discussing on Facebook changed role and scope. While discussing, Ryan asks some questions on real role of Facebook and if an alternative not driven by the market should be found (full story at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/).

I think that Mark Zuckerberg’s company that started as a place for meeting and sharing has changed into a cash cow.

This is not, of course, bad at all. What is bad is the will to overcome everything and force users at having unwanted behaviours.

This is part induced by the tons of features available and that only a few masters, and part of how much the informations are spreaded for commercial pourposes.

And part by the stupidity of some people that count over anonimity in order to do and act as they wouldn’t in real life.

When you join a Social network, most of the people think of a “healthy” place to share thoughts and informations or to meet people. But this is the good part, because lot of informations remain there available for most of the people (and companies).

As I wrote in another article, if on top of this the owner (Facebook) of infrastructure isn’t capable of managing it, the result is that everyone of us is subject to the risks of sharing informations and, at same time, brings lot of money to those having access to those datas.

I’m not quite sure that switching to an open source alternative is the solution, but I think that a signal to Facebook should be given.

This post as a comment also at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/comment-page-2/#comment-46354