Category: Facebook

Ever feel like Facebook is everywhere? Yahoo News has a great news feed with lots of articles and I regularly read news there. Today I was reading an article, wanted to comment on it, and found that I couldn’t comment without using a Facebook login.

Now, I try to keep some of my opinions off of Facebook. I have lots of friends from diverse backgrounds there and I don’t really want to offend any of them with my latest opinion about Rush Limbaugh, Solar Flares or Chocolate Milk. Because of this, I don’t typically login with my FB ID to other sites when I comment. I have a Yahoo account and I like to use that for commenting on Yahoo.

Well today things changed. Today, instead of being able to login and comment as a Yahoo user I was forced to access facebook. Yahoo even wanted to connect my existing Yahoo account to FB.

Facebook and Yahoo and all these other sites need to stop this. I want to compartmentalize my life to a certain extent and keep my public, private and professional lives a little bit separate. Having my profile picture with my niece and I show up on Yahoo is disturbing and as a result I will likely not post to Yahoo any more and reserve browsing Yahoo to when I am not logged in to Facebook. This needs to stop. Sure, Facebook is all about the money, especially with an IP coming up, and I understand that Yahoo and these other sites are desperately trying to hook into Facebook and ride it to the top, but this is not acceptable. Facebook is not the One Ring to Rule Them All, and if it is it needs to be thrown into the fires of a Volcano NOW!

Facebook has become part of many of our daily lives, and in spite of the constant random updates and annoying changes, we are still sometimes lulled into trusting it. Such was the case for the honest man who found one of the Slate writers MacBook Air in a New York Taxi Cab. The finder’s well meaning messages didn’t get to the recipient because of the Other tab, and this journalist nearly lost her high priced laptop forever.

Back in 2009 Facebook decided to route all messages that didn’t originate with your friends or friends of your friends into a separate mailbox named Other. This basically turns it into a spam folder, and when I looked in mine that’s pretty much what was in there, but you should probably check yours. You never know, there might be a job offer or a note from a secret admirer hiding in there.