Interesting set of posts - mostly by people who don't use FB at all/regularly who never will - kind of reminds me of my wife's midwife - she'd never had children and was in her 60s but she'd read all about it so knew all about the process and the pain...
I do have a FB acct - but I don't use the app on my phone, nor do the chat system where is can filter my text conversations (but if I was really worried about that I guess I wouldn't use Gmail either...?)
Like lots of people, I use it to keep in contact with a large number of friends and family who are now scattered all over the world - with very few exceptions I'm actually friends with people I have actually met in RL(tm) first. For that, it is vaguely useful. As long as you don't live on it, it's not too bad.
Given FB has bought Oculus I suspect their long term plan is not Social Media and VR (there is already a 'Social VR' app for the Oculus powered Gear VR after all) but Social Media and Augmented Reality.
The Sci-Fi writer side of me plots a path into the future where we're all wearing transparent screen AR glasses - news, satnav directions, the price of the thing we're looking at in the window of the shop (if there are any physical shops left) and the special offer in the shop three doors away for the same thing - who paid FB to run an campaign promoting this (or more likely 'online at the FB Store') etc are all overlaid on the real world by an FB powered engine.
This engine will be managing and studying us all (even if you're not on FB, you will still be interacting with people who are) - not only where we are and what we're doing - but what we're looking at, how long we linger, how we feel when we're looking at things (you don't just 'like' things on FB any more - you have the option to 'love', 'haha', 'wow', 'sad' and 'angry' at things too - so it's already started - but of course all those of you who don't/won't use FB might not necessarily know this...) - all of this will be crunched into useful data that will either be used by FB directly to sell us stuff or the collated data will be sold (by FB) to others...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
