I'm on your Facebook, linking your internets

Ahh lolcats, the world is still a better when I place references to thee in my titles. So having upgraded my knowledge database of the Internet to a patchy 2.1, I decided to look at my mildly neglected bloglines. Sadly it was down for maintenance, so I thought I would peruse techcrunch which I've decided I will often do. When Bloglines is down anyway. That's where I came across/a cropper the latest news that facebook will acting like a gatekeeper/gateway to all things interesting on the web, see the article here.

So how does this affect you and me? Well if you are my friend Phil it means nothing to you, and you will no doubt be chastising me for wasting my time on facebook and not writing my humorous thoughts in my notepad for later telegrams to you. For the rest of my tech savvy interfriends, it means you can now delve even deeper into your 'im interested in your activities on the net, but I don't want to look like I'm interested in your activities on the net' habits. Make sense? partial credit?

Well, Since I have a strict moral code of not using facebook at work, and some sort of hazy rule about doing work at home (a holdover grudge from my uni days no doubt) I have yet to actually test what this will all mean to me. however tech nut Mr Scoble has sussed it all out for me.

But what does it all mean Mr Keith? it Mean to say in that in a Star Trek world, that if the web was like space, and the websites were like planets, facebook would be like the Borg. They would assimilate everything, and your (like)ness would be added to their own. I would write your own, but that avatar on the net, its theirs.

Humor aside, does it mean that facebook is evil? it certainly looks like it is trying to monopolise the way in which people will access the Internet. their nanoprobes will be everywhere. you can even chart your assimilation success! Do I want Facebook knowing everything I do so it can push products and services upon me? Well, do I want to tell my mum everything I do and everywhere I go so she can tell all her friends? Not really. I can see it being good in assisting me find things of interest, but bad in that my web activities are going to be monitored in the extreme. I will of course have to test this myself, but as usual, this Suburbanite is wary of big development moving in.