I'm also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they announced public search listings on Facebook. I'm utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people's FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you're findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize. zrven a college network is not that secure. MySpace on the other hand is rather simple: public or friends-only. Friends-only is far more secure than the defaults on Facebook. And public is well-understood to mean anyone could access it (and often this is the goal). But I know all too well that privacy has nothing to do with reality - it's all about perception. And Facebook *feels* more secure than MySpace, even if it's not. Still, I can't wait to see how a generation of college students feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches. That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not.

It seems odd to me that Facebook is doing all sorts of things to go against what gave them such strength: group support for people who wanted to gather around a particular activity, tightly controlled privacy defaults, and simple/clean profiles (which have been made utterly gaudy by Apps). I think I'm missing the logic here. ::scratching forehead::

Ross -- thanks for the shout-out on Rapleaf. Anyone can opt-out of Rapleaf (and you do not become a user). We do have a bunch of people that opt-out every day. We also have many people that choose to only display some of their information (like just hiding their age or gender). There are many public profiles about people on the Internet (ZoomInfo, Spock, Wink, Rapleaf, and others) … at Rapleaf, our goal is give people the opportunity to manage their privacy and numerous online profiles and control what people see about them. Of course, we're a start-up (and thus not perfect) … so we really welcome your suggestions on how to improve.