Mabfan's Musings

I've a passion, a la Plato, for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean.

When my younger brother Josh was neglecting his Facebook account, his wife Rachel signed him up for a bunch of fan pages. Josh became a fan of mashed potatoes, which prompted me to note that I like them too, but don't really consider myself a "fan" of them. :-)

Some more information on "community pages": http://librarianbyday.net/2010/05/facebook-community-pages-vs-official-pages-and-your-library-or-business/

Wow. That explains why posts from other Michael Bursteins on Facebook are showing up on the page.

I think these pages need some sort of disclaimer letting people know that they are not monitored or run by the people or groups they are about.

I'd be real careful with all this.

From the people at EFF who understand it more than I do:

I'm from Facebook and I'm here to help you"

Apparently, there isn't much I can do to control the page. Signing up to work on it at the very least gives me some ability to do something with it, I hope.

Don't get too passionate with yourself in a public place like Facebook. Could be embarassing and/or illegal in some states.

Before you get much older, I'd bone up on what the media is saying about Facebook, privacy, and other related rights. Seems they're being mightily possessive about data and what they can do with it, and what you can and (more importantly) can't opt out of.
Seems they've adopted the worst of the AOL playbook.

I've pretty much given up on social media (except for "retweet this to enter a chance to win a book" type deals). I had a rather bizarre experience recently when I asked a women in one of my college courses to help me (she worked at a local non-profit and I was trying to find a local non-profit to volunteer at so I wanted to ask her about her job and maybe volunteer at her work). Between the time I had asked her (via email) to speak to me and the time we met, there had been maybe 6 emails and a few messages over twitter been us. During which I had agreed to work on her non-profit's adwords campaign. So I examined her organizations website (including the blog which she posts to, and the linkedin, twitter, and faceboook pages put up by their PR people). When I talked to her I got told I was creepy because I knew too much about her, even though every single thing I knew was something she had put out on the internet for public consumption and she knew I was working on a project for her (I didn't even look at non-business stuff about her). I ended up getting fired from the project (at the end of the conversation I tried to bring up what I was working on, only to be asked/told "more", when I had not given her anything yet.) So, I think I'm going to stick with good old fashion, non-internet networking from now on.

Hi, who is this? Could you identify yourself please?

I've just deactivated my FB account over privacy concerns. The stunt you just recounted is in fact the last straw.

I'm close to doing that myself. Be advised, however: the EFF says that even if you delete your account, Facebook keeps certain information and may make it available to third parties.

I never actually loaded much personal information there. FB, however, can fill in the blanks... I should probably go back and delete all my friends.

I think it's a function of your listed interests on your "about" page. Heck, it's likely that enough people have put your name down under favorite books, it has earned it's own fan page!

I wonder how they decide whom to build a community page for. I don't appear to have acquired one yet (though I do have a wikipedia page). Weird.