Kevin Keene

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of e-mails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling—you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed e-mail clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving, and searching. E-mails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages; they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!

— Cory Doctorow,  How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook (via stoweboyd)

(Source: quod.lib.umich.edu, via stoweboyd)