So… last time I blogged was months ago.  Back then I was in Brazil.  Where have I been since then?  No, I was not kidnapped in a favela.  No, I was not out of topics.  Actually, I had many things to write.  Just for starters I traveled back and forth to Brazil, drove to Berlin, joined a gospel choir and sung in a famous theatre.  The problem is, I just got sucked into Facebook.

At the beginning I used Facebook to keep in touch with my friends abroad.  For this usage pattern I think it was a good tool, because you receive a constant feed of updates from your friends: their mood, their pictures, their friends, their new interests and so on.  You can filter and prioritize stuff and organize your daily dose of updates.

One the other hand, FB can be a total disaster for you privacy, much more than any other social network, because everybody appears with their actual name and everything you write (and everything you friends write and tag about you) is immediately forwarded to all of your friends and God knows who else.  Even basic good practices like keeping a clear border between your work and your private life can be very difficult.

So there are pros and cons.  Is it worthwhile?  I don’t know.  For sure the potential is great because in July this website was basically unknown in Italy (I used it only for foreign friends) and now I have most of my Italian friends on it.  It’s so popular that yesterday I was walking in the city center and I heard everybody and his brother talking about it.  Some of my friends even taught it to their moms and at the Xmas lunch my aunt used my laptop to check out her page!  Go figure.

On nice thing is that suddenly I started to receive connection invitations from friends I had last heard last century.  This is great!  Through Facebook I could reconnect to friends I had totally lost!  The problem is, this service is growing exponentially both on the usefulness axis and on the danger axis and I feel like the thing is quickly going to out of control.  There are already many reports of identity thefts performed through Facebook and their privacy statement is particularly scary.  The fact that Facebook is located in a foreign country ruled by an administration that showed absolutely no love for privacy doesn’t help either.  It does not surprise me that among the investors in FB there are venture capitalists connected to the CIA.

One thing I totally hate is that immediately after you complete the subscription process they ask you to enter your gmail login so that they can fetch your data (e.g. your address book) from there.  They say this is convenient but to me this looks outrageous.  I mean, if you login in my gmail account you have access to: my analytics, my documents, my calendar, my email, all the password remainders I received from other sites.  And from there you can read more password reminders just by going to a website and entering my email address, including the one for my bank account.  This is the same as giving away your entire life!

Unfortunately my brain bandwidth for online time was limited and when I started to use Facebook on a daily basis my time budget for this blog went dramatically down.   I’m sorry for this because I still like this blog and I think Facebook is no substitute for it so I think I’ll try to use less Facebook and move back to this place.