Hi Mir,

We can still have beer. I'll still have a Guinness and I suppose you can have some fruity raspberry-flavored light Miller Draft or something. To each their own.

Audience attention and audience demographics have always been a commodity [...] But since this is information I am willingly giving to them - how is it a privacy issue? I clearly don't think pictures of me and my dog are private, and as to what they will do with the data - they will use it to try and sell me shit ...

1. I'm not sure what you mean by 'audience attention' or 'demographics' being a commodity, nor the link you draw between that and data privacy. I am glad that you chose the word 'audience' though, since it illustrates your awareness - subconscious though it may be - that you're watching a show, a soap opera, a piece of entertainment: one that's illustrated by the careful organization of you and your friends' lives.
2. Just because you willingly hand over your data doesn't make the privacy issue any less pressing. The fact of the matter is that there is much more happening with your data than 'them trying to sell you shit', which has been gone over ad infinitum and is beyond the scope of this comment. It's not a conspiracy - the truth is far simpler and far more interesting than "Facebook = CIA". Everything you ever post, write, or comment on Facebook is available to any organization to collect, process, and build a profile on you - whether they be Kellogg's cereal or Homeland Security. The fact that you're blindly handing all of it over without batting an eyelash doesn't change the severity of the problem, though the nature of the problem is shown to be more about educating users like yourself than "blaming Facebook for making an easy-to-use, attractive data-mining service". Just because you're posting seemingly harmless little pieces of information on there doesn't mean that they can't build a more accurate portrait of you than some of your best friends can have. Alone, those little pieces of data seem insignificant, but add them all up together and anyone gets a pretty good summary of who 'Mir' really is.

The tools we use to express our relationships to each other do not dictate the depth of the relationship. Facebook does not create shallow bonds it may do a better job of expressing them though. [...] The nice thing about Facebook is of all the tools I think it offers the most potential to mimic peoples actual social behaviours. [...] It's not as simplistic as you are making it out to be here.

1. Relationship you conduct over Facebook, email, the telephone, and mostly in person will all have different depths of emotional anchorage. There's no way around that. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you feel the same way about relationships you've established (and maintain) on Facebook as those that you develop with friends you hang out with in the real world, around town, every week? If your answer is 'yes' then you might want to rethink the value you're giving to the relationships facilitated and mediated via some company's money-making machine.
2. I never said anything was wrong about the tools and functionality offered by Facebook. It's a beautifully programmed application that's obviously been molded into shape by people [social scientists?] who know what they are doing. I would be the biggest Facebook cheerleader (hmmm, not that "big cheerleaders" are necessarily what I'm into...) if Facebook was owned, operated an run in the same manner as, say, Wikipedia, and had a much more transparent procedure for how they treated your data, and offered better means to control your privacy settings, and wasn't run by people with ties to shady organizations, and many many other ands.
3. No, it's not simplistic at all. It's all incredibly complex, and that complexity, that barrier of entry to understanding the implications of it all, is a big part of what makes otherwise brilliant people - you - hand over the near entirety of your online persona to Facebook, with nary a question asked.

I am willing to bet that I will stay in touch with the Swedish guy down the line whereas I can't be so sure about Mr Hong-Kong, he's not going to stay on my social radar the same way - so we'll end up drifting away. So for me, social software despite maybe the limitations of it's utility is important glue for holding some links together.

1. Doesn't that strike you as odd though? That almost all of your 'social radar' is owned and operated by some company in the US, with people you never even met having full access to it? It would take you the exact same amount of time to send an email to Mr. Hong Kong as would to write a wall post on Mr. Sweden's Facebook profile. So, you're basically going to abandon one line of (potentially fruitful) friendship because it's not Facebook based. Social Network Fascism, anyone? It's been said that the cost of non-participation in Facebook is very high for people like Mr Hong Kong and myself, and anyone "under 30, working in the web industry, in a developed country". I didn't really get it until now, since I'm under 30, working [mostly] in the web industry, living in a developed country, yet not on Facebook but doing better, and feeling more 'connected' than I ever have. But now I see what they meant by that - certain people have been convinced that if a relationship can't be maintained on Facebook, then it's not worth maintaining at all. That's a super-interesting, super-scary fact to realize.