Now, to jump on the bandwagon a full year late: The Show with zeFrank is one of the greatest Net creations I have ever seen. I first started checking out zeFrank’s daily video blog after reading about the Colbert Donut Debacle. I was both transfixed, and confused (check out this New York Times Profile of zeFrank; that seem like that’s the feeling most people get while watching. Check out this awesome episode, where zeFrank does the show from one of his viewer’s perspectives, and proves he’s very much aware of how unexplainable his unique appeal is; actually, you had better watch a couple of ‘regular’ episodes before delving into that bit of twisted brilliance). The guy wasn’t that funny. His facial expression freaked me out. And his production value was shite.

I did admire his stated goal, however: to upload a new video blog post every weekday, 5 days a week, for an entire year. And I’m not talking about a static, 3-minute clip of some jerk spitting junk at his miniDV cam for 3 minutes everyday. zeFrank’s shows are heavily, heavily (did I mention heavily?) edited, and often extensively researched and referenced. The show may look like crap, but a lot goes into each (takes zeFrank about 6-hours to produce each show, according to a Newsweek article).

If you somehow haven’t checked out zeFrank before, let me guide you to a week of 5 vids that I think best exemplify the genius of the show.

Start here. After you watch this video (Sept. 18, 2006, the beginning of Happy Week!) click on the next link above the video to go to the Sept. 19, 2006 video. Continue watching each video of this week until you arrive at the end of the week. 5 short videos. That’s all I’m asking you to watch. This amazing group of video posts contains virtually every element that gets me so excited about internet videos, podcasts, and new media in general.

Watched them? Good. Here are 3 reasons why Internet Video will continue to rock the world.

1. It’s too smart for TV.
   
• ZeFrank’s take on the book Stumbling On Happiness. I can’t think of a single old media broadcast outlet for this kind of intelligent rant. TV? No way. The only place you could see a clip approximating this anywhere before the internet would probably be somewhere like NPR, except that would would be a laborious, 15-minute discussion with the no doubt charmless psychiatrist author of the tome. zeFrank’s summary of the ideas in the book is enlightening, pithy, and often quite funny (”they’re not bullshitting!”). More amazing, the clip fits perfectly into what may have seemed like an arbitrary theme for this week of his show (’Happy Week’).
2. It’s Too Quick, Too Clued In, Too Hip
   
• Throughout the week, zeFrank makes mention of an impossibly random internet phenomenon, the 45-second WhipAss audio clip. Forget the movies, Internet is the real ‘lightning in a bottle.’ Fads zoom through the Interweb so quickly, so improbably that old media can’t possibly hope to stay hip (Over 9000, anyone?). zeFrank’s legion of fans siphon him, throughout the week, the best re-mixes and mash-ups the collective Net is churning out, and zeFrank works the best clips into his show. Can you imagine ‘the kids’ possibly sending their favorite remixes of a random audio clip that is being forwarded around the web this week to some talking head on the television? Ain’t gonna happen. And that’s just fine, because important TV folks don’t give a damn about that audio clip anyway… But we do. And with each micro-generation, ‘we’ is getting exponentially bigger.
3. Freedom and Turnaround
1. zeFrank spends 3-seconds saying that a non-existent rule book states his viewers (those would be the ‘Sports Racers’) must dress up their vacuum cleaners. A quick example pic is flashed, and that’s it. No other instruction. No narrator droning on about the rules and regulations. It’s not at all clear. And yet, the very next video is flashing pics of his viewers’ dressed up vacuum cleaners. And they keep coming and coming. I’d wager he received hundreds of pics. Why did people do this? There is no good answer, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s something amazing about how quickly the internet video world can react, can change, how quickly viewership can grow, how devoted fans can be. There’s no money involved. There’s no greater interest. There’s only entertainment, passion, and camaraderie. Perhaps most importantly, the camaraderie.

zeFrank ended his show recently, after successfully completing his year of constant posting. I guess it was as good a time as any for this post, though, after getting sucked into that Happy Week, I’m willing to wager you won’t be happy about the fact that you can’t watch a new episode everyday.

Well, after only a day of using Google Docs, I realized it won’t, in fact, take me a month to fully evaluate it: it sucks. The deal breaker for me is the fact that it doesn’t have any margins. That means that as wide as you stretch the window, the text will stretch right along with it. As skinny as you squash the window, the text will contract. And if you export it to a Word document, it’s a mis-aligned mess. Screw that.

I am kind of charmed by these available-anywhere online word processors, though, and I’ve heard good things about Zoho ThinkFree. I’m going to move my test over to that service.

And now, uh, back to the real news…

Two Google stories in a row?! Has the world gone topsy-turvy?

No, it hasn’t, little kid. But, in all likely hood in response to my post yesterday, Google has followed up their uninspiring purchase of YouTube with the full Beta release of “Google Docs & Spreadsheets ” (I’m going to assume this will later be renamed simply “Google Office,” or perhaps the simpler “Google Docs”).

The new Google section now simply consists of two web services/programs: Google Docs & Google Spreadsheets; put simply, Google is creating Microsoft Office inside your browser. Eventually, one envisions all your favorite Office programs usable right inside your browser of choice, and all for free.

So, who would want this? Well, I would, for one. The biggest benefit of having your word processor online is that all of your files are automatically stored online, re: accessible anywhere. You can set up Google to save revisions of your docs. You can search through your docs, just like you do your Gmail. You and others can all colaberate edit, revise the same document online, and the updated copy will always be available to everyone (no emailing new versions of a doc around the office). This IS the future of bare-bones, Microsoft Office-like products. I guarantee it.

There are still some problems. Google Docs, for instance, doesn’t offer anywhere near the functionality of Microsoft Word; and it is a bit annoying to have your “program” running inside your browser, which you use to do so many other things. But, like everything else from Google, these web services are still in Beta, and they’ll certainly get better as Google studies how people use them.

Anyway, I’m hereby making a pledge. For the next month, I will use Google Docs, and only Google Docs, at the office. At the end of the month I’ll blog up the experience, let you all know how the web-Word really works. Google Docs let you save your web documents as .doc files, so I’ll be able to send my pages to co-workers using Word if need be. Let the testing begin!

UDPATE: So, I finish writing this Blog Post in Google Docs (I always write my posts in a word processor, so as to spell check them) and I notice a nifty little “Publish” button. Pressing this button, Google lets you either publish your doc to a website (think google.com/joes_doc) or publish it to your blog! So, by using Google docs, I’ve just elimiated the step of copy and pasting my posts from Word into my Cosmonaut News blog. Not bad!

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Yawn.  This was a thoroughly un-Google move for the innovative company, snatching up a service that offers virtually the same technology as their Google Video: user-uploaded Flash Video.  Google wasn’t buying up some new idea; they weren’t buying up a bunch of genius programmers.  No, they were, plain and simple, buying a user base.  Again, yawn…

Google, the ethos, isn’t supposed buy users.  Dammit, Google takes users.  Google builds web services that are better than the competition and, like magic, users doth follow.  Rewind back a couple of years, if you will: Google decides it wants to offer a mapping service.  At the time, the king of the hill was MapQuest, with Yahoo Maps and a smattering of others offering similar mapping programs.  MapQuest was, remember, truly something new under the sun:  you type in your address, type in where you want to go, and MapQuest spits out directions, turn by turn.  It was amazing; love that Interweb!  Sure, the site was slow, and the interface was clunky (want to scroll right on the map?  Click the map’s right arrow, the entire page (slowly) reloads, and you’ve “scrolled” Westward.  Want to scroll over more?  Reload that sucker again…), but hey, we all thought, it’s just a website; its shoddy interface is a limitation of HTML.  We accepted MapQuest, because we were so enthralled with the service.  We didn’t know something better was possible.

So the search hotshot Google decides it wants to offer up a mapping service of its own.  MapQuest must have had something like 80% of web mapping traffic at the time.  Imagine if Google did then what Google is doing now, and simply bought MapQuest?  Well, why not?  They’d be buying all those millions of MapQuest users, and they’d have MapQuest’s “great” mapping technology.  Except…  Oh yeah, MapQuest sucked, and we didn’t even know it!

It wasn’t until Google went and built a better mousetrap (mapping site) that we realized how much better web mapping (and web services in general) could be.  And then, boy, did we ever flock to Google Maps.  Again, that’s the way of doing business that has made Google the powerhouse it is today: they don’t buy customers, they woo them with superior offerings.  It’s worked well for them thus far: their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail.  Google video, in fact, is one of the few “big” services offered by Google that hasn’t caught on in a big way.  I had thought that meant Google must have had a team of crack programmers and designers working furiously on coming up with a better, more innovative web video product.  But no, instead, Google simply went and bought a website virtually identical to their own Google Video, simply because they had a larger user base.

As was the case with MapQuest, YouTube is an incredibly sloppy web offering, one that could be vastly improved upon.  Google has said its engineers will be working with YouTube’s designers to come up with new features.  But without the flame under Google’s ass (i.e., “YouTube has millions more users than us!  We need to come up with something GREAT to lure them over to our side”) I’m doubtful the new features will be all that innovative, or will arrive as quickly as they would have if Google was still in competition with YouTube.  Instead, Google is taking a page from ol’ Microsoft’s playbook and creating a kind of mini-web-video-monopoly.  There’s only one certainty when it comes to monopolies: consumers lose.

Last night I was once again pulled into the comic tragedy that is Dateline’s new series, “To Catch A Predator.” You’ve no doubt seen or heard of this show, where they have a group of concerned citizens, who’ve christened themselves “Perverted Justice” (clever, no?), hang out in online chat rooms pretending to be teenage girls, trying to lure stupidly-unsuspecting older men into coming to a house for sex. The show’s a real laugh; last night some guy even got tasered as he ran wild-eyed away from that paradigm of serious journalism, Chris Hanson. The older, and often times rather sad, men invariably claim they weren’t actually coming over to have sex with the girl, at which point Hanson reads them off a few choice lines from their explicit chat log, they recoil in shame, the cameramen pop out, and then the police make an arrest; all in all, a pretty solid TV formula.

But there are quite a few things that rub me the wrong way about this show (disregarding the obviously high levels of schadenfreude involved). First and foremost: Perverted Justice? Are you kidding me? Whenever they cut to clips of these people “at work,” we see that they’re a bunch of overweight, ugly, pitiful looking human beings sitting side-by-side in what appears to be a dark basement at one of their parent’s house. They spend their day (or night?) typing away on the computer, pretending to be pre-pubescent girls or boys, having cybersex, downloading pictures of genitals men to send to them, impersonating little girls on the phone, and on and on. Am I the only one who is nearly as put-off by people who engage in that night after night as I am by the older men looking for sex?

Next we have the fact that the men who show up at the houses are arrested. I’m certainly no lawyer and, since some of these guys are going to jail, I guess the laws are in place, but every time I watch this show I get the feeling a halfway decent defender could rip the police’s case apart:

1. This police base their arrest of the predators, when they show up at the house, off of the chat transcripts provided by the Perverted Justice weirdoes. But is the Perverted Justice League of America a reliable sources of incriminating evidence? These people aren’t law enforcement. They’ve obviously got an axe to grind, as they volunteer their free time to do the, erm, sexy chatting. It’s of course laughably easy to alter a chat log– is it beyond the realm of possibility that one of these people could chat up a man online, the man could stop just short of talkin’-the-sexy-talk it takes to reach the level of a crime, and then a Perverted Justice Hero In Our Midst would add in a few extra-raunchy lines text so as to ensure the conviction of a man they know is no good, but who hasn’t yet gone far enough to commit a crime? Sounds downright likely to me. Who watches the watchmen? (OK, I’ll drop the superhero metaphors now)
2. Uh, entrapment?
3. The most troubling aspect of this whole procedure to me is the fact that, try as the might, these bumbling predatory men haven’t actually committed a crime. They’re usually charged with something along the lines of “Attempting to obtain sex from a minor online,” laws vary from state to state. But here’s the thing: when they were chatting online, these men weren’t actually talking to a minor; they were talking to adults pretending to be minors. A small distinction, perhaps, but I think it’s an important one. Did they intend to commit a crime? Surely. But they didn’t actually commit one, because they weren’t actually propositioning a minor for sex, they were talking with an adult. One could compare police tactics to John’s who try to get sex from a police officer undercover as a hooker; they arrest the man before he actually has sex with the hooker, i.e., before he commits the crime. But again, that’s different: that law states it is illegal to offer money for sex. So that’s the law they’re breaking, the actual sex act doesn’t need to occur, and the police officer doesn’t need to be an actual hooker (it’s not illegal to offer a hooker money for sex, it’s illegal to offer money for sex, period). But the men online never broke the law of trying to get sex from a minor, because they never even talked to a minor; they were chatting with an adult pretending to be a minor.

This reminds me a bit of a misguided law passed (and, I believe, repealed) a few years back that made it illegal to possess child porn, or to posses “simulated child porn.” I guess the simulated part was intended to make it illegal to posses pictures or video labeled as underage smut, even if the individuals in the video were actually over 18. But it had some (probably) unintended repercussions: bizarrely, this made it illegal to possess any artwork (think 3D-images) of naked children, which of course threw the Libertarians up in arms because the sole-purpose of outlawing child porn (aside from the fact that it’s quite creepy) is to prevent the child from being traumatized. In the case of 3D simulated child porn, no child was being harmed, and so why should it be illegal? Another side affect of the “no simulated naked minors” law, with much larger ramifications, was that it made it illegal to own any movie in which an actress playing a character under the age of 18 is naked or engaged in a sex act. So, uh, that copy of American Pie in your DVD collection, or Academy Award winner American Beauty? That’s right, bub, your ass is going to jail (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the law was eventually changed so that it was only illegal to possess a movie if the actress in the movie actually was under the age of 18, but then people began producing hundreds of examples of classic movies already on the market with bare-chested 16-and-17-year old girls acting in them, thus making the law essentially un-enforceable). The reason I bring up this ill-fated law (aside from the fact that it’s hilarious) is that it seems to me very similar to the situation of the guys getting arrested on Dateline: the “simulated minor” law made it illegal for people to look at nude of-age girls if the perpetrator thought the girl was underage. That never sat right with me.

4. There are other monkey wrenches thrown into this equation that hurts a prosecutor’s case. When these men chat with adults pretending to be children, they often ask the “child” to send a picture. What Perverted Justice usually does is send a picture of the 19-year-old young-looking actress who will be at the house when the Dateline cameras are rolling. This way, the guy will see the girl he expects to see when he shows up at the house. But is it fair that the picture sent to entice the guy into coming to the house isn’t some 14-year-old with braces, but rather a sexy 19-year-old that one could reasonably expect any man to be attracted to? They’re arresting him for trying to shack up with a 14-year-old girl, but the girl he was attracted to is actually 19-years-old; of-age. If the guy went all the way and had sex with 19-year-old actress, would police still be able to charge him? With what? Having sex with a 19-year-old he thought was 14? Can you say “thought-crime?”

My belabored point is this: people should be charged with actual crimes they commit, not with crimes they may have thought they were committing. Don’t get me wrong, I surely symphonize with the intent of the law (not so much with the intent of Dateline, who I can be fairly certain are only in it for the ratings): why not get these sick guys before they can hurt a child. But, unfortunately, to live in a just society, I believe that’s a price that must be paid: a crime has to be committed (yes, someone has to be hurt) before you can punish someone for “doing” it. Nobody wants to stick up for these harmful guys, and so unjust tactics/laws such as these wiggle their way into our system. Well, I don’t want to stick up for these guys either, but I’ll certainly give a hand to our system of justice when it’s under attack by sloppy solutions such as this.

iTunes doesn’t work. There, I said. In this era of planned-obsolescence, iTunes is doing things your local refrigerator manufacturer can only dream of.

I have a handful of iTunes-bought music littering my mostly-illegal iTunes music library. About ten or so were downloaded via Pepsi’s free song promotions, and, it seems, I even downloaded a few $10 albums over the past 3-years. I’m aware of this not because I ever listen to the songs, oh no, but rather because I get an annoying error message every time I synch my iPod: “iTunes could not sync certain songs because they are not authorized to play on this computer.” Ah, yes, those damn iTunes-bought songs. Since I inevitably sync my iPod as I run out the door, these days more to grab the latest podcasts than to update my song collection, I simply cancel the message, pop out the podicle, and race to my car. And thus the cycle continues.

I couldn’t tell you what email address(es) the said iTunes songs were bought under. Since, I would guess, I bought and downloaded the songs shortly after iTunes began selling music, probably for sheer novelty factor, they’re most likely under my old college email address, an account I, of course, have no access to now that I’ve graduated. I’m sure iTunes has some kind of system set up whereas I can go in, answer “safety” questions, fill out a new account, put in a new credit card number (since I’ve switched banks, I’m sure they’ve got an old debit card on file as well), etc., etc., etc… Haven’t done that yet, pretty sure I won’t be doing it later, not when I could have the whole album downloaded illegally and without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions in less time than it would take to reauthorize my songs for my new iPod and computer (heck, since I already paid for the songs, I won’t even feel guilty about it).

This post could go in many directions at this point: I could ponder the logic in using temporary-by-their-very-nature email addresses as user account names with something you supposedly “own” forever (10-years ago I had an AOL email address, for chrissake), or how the heck my grandmother is supposed to figure out how to re-authorize her latest Frank Sinatra tracks when she moves to a new iMac. But let’s just keep it simple: iTunes (more specifically, DRM) doesn’t work for the following reason: I’m not at all confident that 10-years from now, on whatever flying-spaceship computer I happen to be using, I’ll be able to play the iTunes songs I bought in 2006. I think the format will either be totally discontinued, or at some point over in the decade, I will have failed to have jumped through one of the maddening hoops Apple and the music labels erected, and I will have lost my chance to “update” the song status to play on my new computer(s). Because I’m not confident I’ll be able to use the songs I bought 10-years hence, I simply don’t buy them. To me, that means iTunes and DRM is broken.

Yahoo! is now trying to start its own music download service. The service will sell MP3’s without any restrictions, just like you used to be able to download on old illegal Napster. Since they have no restrictions, they’ll never expire or need to be re-authorized. They’ll be able to play on any portable music player that can play MP3’s (virtually all of them). They’ll just be the music you bought, nothing more. But, you guessed it, music co.’s aren’t too keen on giving consumers this much freedom. Fine. Keep putting up false walls, music industry, I’ll keep downloading music for free, and you won’t see a dime.

Go West and build a Web 2.0 company, young man! With the recent offer by Yahoo! to buy Facebook for a reported $900,000,000, the web has been in a tizzy (seems to be a lot of “tizzy’s” going around these days, eh?) over who will be the next to sell. Here’s my take on the Big 3:

Facebook

I’ve ranted about this company’s questionable practices before, but the truth is I love the Facebook, and personally consider it to be the most potentially valuable company of all I’ll list here today. In fact, I had fallen off a bit with my Facebook use (since I, you know, graduated) until they instituted the News Feed feature that got me so riled up. In my checking out how pervasive the feature was, I got dragged into the Facebook web all over again, and now find myself checking friend’s profiles, tagging pictures, and even setting up parties with the service. And yes, I’ll admit it, I even like using the News Feed to spy on others, now that Facebook has giving me the option to opt-out for myself (I’m a big hypocrite).

The exciting thing about the Yahoo! buy is that Yahoo! also owns Flickr, and the potential to tie the two services together is too obvious to miss. Adding Flickr’s photo services to Facebook’s social networking, and vice-versa, is going to be great, especially since Facebook has sub-par photo sharing technology, and Flickr has sub-par social networking technology in place. I love this buy; accept, Facebook, accept!

YouTube

YouTube brings nothing to the table. People think they love YouTube, when in fact they just love the Flash Video Format. You got to YouTube and, miracle of miracles, web based video just works. Never mind the fact that it looks like crap; it works every time.

Consistency is all the site has going for it. Back in November, 2 million people clicked a link provided by friends or blogs that led to an SNL musical parody. The clicker’s were half-expecting an error message when the video loaded, telling them they were in need of this or that plugin. Instead, they were amazed to find an admittedly cruddy looking video load quickly and without fail. The YouTube boom had begun, and it hasn’t stopped expanding since. But their method of automatically converting user-uploaded video of nearly any format into FLV for display on their site is not patentable and, indeed, not even based on their own technology.

YouTube should sell now, sell while the gettin’s good. They don’t present anything innovative, which means they’re in constant danger of losing their audience to a site that hosts user-submitted video just a little bit better. Just a little bit is all it takes, ask Friendster…

digg

I have a soft spot for digg.com, and for its founder, Kevin Rose, who I listen to every week on his podcast Diggnation. I applauded its move beyond tech news into sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. But, well, the fact is that the digg.com user base is still made up of tech geeks, and tech geeks posting about sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. turns out to be a bit narrow-sighted. Contrary to what we may have wanted to believe, digg is not going to replace the New York Times any time soon. In fact, as a news source, digg is a joke. It’s a bunch of geeks posting geeky stories that 90% of the public couldn’t care less about, no matter what news category the stories fall under.

For this reason, and I really hate to say this, I can actually see the new digg-ripoff Netscape.com, with its more diverse, less geek-prone user base, really being the site that changes the news biz. Oh well. Digg is still a great, daily read, but a serious news source it certainly is not…

Netflix has decided to sue Blockbuster Online for patent-infringement. They argue that Blockbuster has stolen their ideas of renting movies online which are then delivered via the mail, not charging late fees, and allowing users to create a list, or queue, of movies they wish to receive next. Blockbuster, in turn, is counter-suing Netflix under anti-trust statutes, claiming that the company is trying to set up a monopoly in the internet video rental sector.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit bewildered when it comes to patent law. There is an entire arm of the government set up to research the validity of and grant patents. Netflix was granted a patent for its service (for its way of doing business, really), and so, logically, it seems if they have the patent, they have the patent, and Blockbuster is out of luck.

But the system does not work this way, as Blockbuster can argue in court that Netflix never should have been granted such a patent in the first place, and the court can rule to strike the patent down. So a patent isn’t worth all that much after all.

Being that all of this is up in the air, we might as well take a look at what the case will argue.

1. Should Netflix have been granted a patent for delivering movies via the mail.

This one seems easy enough: hell no. Look, I know patents are getting a bit out of hand, but any logical person will have to admit that being granted a patent for the “idea” of sending a “certain item” through the mail is absurd. Moving on.

2. Not charging late fees.

OK, here we get a bit more innovative, but this still doesn’t past this spaceman’s test. To me, charging late fees was the original innovation. That was an idea. Not charging them is more of a return to normalcy.

3. The rental queue.

I’m willing to give this one to Netflix. The idea of a queue, or even an online queue, of course isn’t new. But here’s the thing: the less a Netflix user “turns around” their rentals (receives a DVD in the mail, watches it, sends it back in, and receives a new DVD in the mail), the more money Netflix makes. Netflix users pay a monthly fee, and the fee remains the same no matter how many movies they rent. The fewer movies a user “turns around” per month, the less money Netflix has to spend on postage, worker hours, etc. for that user. The fewer copies of DVD’s Netflix has to keep in stock. The less a user turns around their DVD’s, the better for Netflix.

For this reason, I conjecture that if a more ruthless company had created an online movie rental site (re: Blockbuster), they would not have instituted a queue which automatically sends out a new DVD as soon as the last DVD a user rented is returned. A more dominant company would almost certainly have made the user wait a couple of days for their DVD to return to the rental HQ in the mail, than go online and choose a new movie they would like to rent. All this would slow things down (users would forget to order a new one, users would have to return to the site and search for a new movie every time, etc.) making for fewer rentals per user on average; for the rental company, this means more profit.

But Netflix put the queue feature in. Because they were the little guy fighting to win customers against the goliath that was Blockbuster, they focused not on maximizing their profits, but instead on creating a better user experience than the big guy offered. The queue, in this regard, truly was an innovation and, I would argue, worthy of a patent. When Blockbuster entered the online rental arena a few years later, they found themselves in the unlikely position of little/new guy, and so they copied Netflix’s formula hoping to steal its users away.

The somewhat ironic thing about all this is that the most patentable feature of all is the idea of movie rentals, period. But this idea was thought up in less patent-happy times, and I think we can all agree we’re happy about that, otherwise Blockbuster may be the only fish in the movie rental sea.

I had many fears in college. Failing exams. Cockily drinking myself to death some brazen Saturday night. Showing up dateless to the Mid-Term-Survivors Ice Cream Social (shudder). But my biggest fear was not overt. My biggest fear twirled lazily ’round the back of my mind, its mere possibility always terrifying, though it never quite seemed to come to pass. The biggest fear? That some how, some way, unbeknownst to me, other Instant Messenger users could find out how many times I checked their profiles/away messages.

OK, OK, maybe it wasn’t my biggest fear, but certainly it was the most nagging. With all the AIM hacks floating about the InterWeb, surely someone must have come up with few lines of code that recorded whenever someone looked at your profile. But, surprisingly, I never came across such a hack, and if ol’ computer geek me didn’t know of one, then the mass general population of college AIM users certainly didn’t know about it, and so I could breathe easy whilst I maniacally checked, rechecked, and checked again on the Away Messages and Buddy Profiles of my signed on friends.

It was an addiction. I’d sit at my desk, text book spread out in front of me, and study to the flickering glow of my computer monitor. Read a page, click through the away messages. Read a page, flick through the away messages. I was always well aware of how completely crazy I’d look if anyone was ever able to see the tally of my checking on their profile: “13 times in two hours?! What a freak!” And if I had a crush on some girl? Well, then, my obsessive checking would sink past those already pathetic lows.

All this was on my mind when heard about the Facebook’s new “Feed” technology. Essentially, every time a user now signs onto the Facebook they’re greeted with a personalized news feed of what their friend’s have been up to, complete with time and date. The Facebook community is in quite a tizzy about this, setting up petitions against it on, what else ,the Facebook. But it all seemed pretty innocuous to me: “John has updated his favorite songs list.” Or, “Rachel and Frank have broken up.” Eh, no biggie, I thought. After all, if you went into your list of friends it already highlighted those profiles that have recently been updated.

But I signed in to my own Facebook account today to see what all the fuss was about and, suddenly, I felt my safe little cyber-world crashing down around me. There, in my mini-feed, sat the following update: “Erin is stalking you on facebook.”

Gulp.

Erin, it turns out, is a girl who knows another girl I know. We’re acquaintances in real life, though not officially “friends” on the Facebook. Erin had, as far as I can deduce, viewed my profile a few times recently, and Facebook was alerting me to this fact…

My God. It was everything I feared. My mind reeled with all the profiles I’d viewed on Facebook in the past few months. The beauty of the Facebook, its killer app, if you will, is it’s daisy-linking, drag you in technology. A friend leaves a message on your board -> you click to that friend’s profile -> you see a person you met once listed as one of that person’s friends -> you click through and take a gander at that person’s profile. That’s what Social Networking is all about. But, for the love of God, I do not (DO NOT!) want that near-stranger to know I was looking at their profile. I do not want some girl I hooked up with a couple of years ago to know that I still view her profile once in a while to see what she’s up to now. I do not want my High School enemy to know that I was viewing his profile (to gain insight into his weaknesses, no doubt!).

The fact that nobody would want people to be able to track their profile-viewing habits is so abundantly obvious that I am shocked the Facebook created this feature. No longer can we skip carefree through the green valleys of the Facebook social scene. Every move we make is being tracked, categorized, and fed back to other users. The Facebook isn’t fun any more; it’s dangerous.

And so it seems that nagging college fear of mine has finally come into fruition. We can no longer stalk in secret. Like all those AOL users we laughed at , our embarrassing tracking-tendencies are now up on display. I believe the Facebook has really shot themselves in the foot with this one. The “rebellion” has already started. Let’s see how they respond.

UPDATE (9/8/06): Well, that was quick. As this Slashdot article reports, the Facebook team has spent the last few nights feverishly coding away, and now users are able to control which of their actions are “broadcastable” on other people’s news feeds.

This obviously makes me happy (back to stalking in secret!), but from a wider point of view, this compromise is only acceptable if the news feed is shut off by default for users. People should have to opt-in to have their every move broadcast on the Facebook, not opt-out if they don’t. Sure, ol’ Slashdot-reading me will now know enough to go and adjust my Facebook Privacy settings, but will idiot Sorority girls? Will new users of the Facebook, who will just assume that’s the way it works when they sign up? Most computer users don’t even know to turn on Tabbed Browsing in Firefox, and we’re expecting them to delve deep into the Facebook privacy dialogs? Getting better, Facebook, but not a perfect solution by any means…