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Book the First: The Unmistakable Smell of Revolution
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When you have a number of online profiles, none have the ability to completely define you.
If you have a MySpace, Ning, Flickr, and Facebook, who's to say which is the canonical representation
of you? As these other networks go out of fashion and we consolidate around Facebook, this profile 
become less about representation and more about identity. And Facebook really, really, really wants to 
own your identity, because it is worth a lot more money to them than just another profile. But of course
for Facebook, owning your identity is not worthwhile (profitable) unless this information can be shared
(sold) with third parties (businesses). So Facebook continually pulls up the blinds on our profile and
our information, because it is more "open".

Selling us this notion of openness feels an awful lot like all the companies trying to capitalize on the
green movement. Who wouldn't want to save a tree? Who doesn't want to live in an open society? But as Sam
said, what Zuckerberg doesn't seem to understand is that he doesn't get to decide whether or not we are
ready for an "open society and world". And given his continuous lack of respect for We the Users, when his
vision of "transparency" also conveniently happens to be the one that is most profitable for his company,
its hard not to question his motives.

If you want open, then just remove all privacy settings and don't let users change them. I feel more free
already! Of course, no one would go for this. So we can agree there is some kind of value judgement happening
about how much privacy is the right amount. And according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg is almost
singlehandedly making this decision for all of us.

Book the Second: The Calculus of Change
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"Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree.
Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What's
in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing." - Seth Godin

As a friend of mine named Andy put it recently, "The service has changed, as have the costs and benefits associated
with participating, and that calculus no longer makes sense for me." If as Sam says Facebook is not a service, then
it certainly isn't a public service or utility as some would argue
(http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html).(Paul Carr's
brilliant test for whether or not something is a utility is "if the sentence ‘Millions of children in Africa have no
access to x’ doesn’t sound like a headline from the Onion. Try it with electricity, water and Facebook. See?")
Certainly this is the only defense for Facebook's actions: it is a private company and can mostly do whatever
it pleases. But then so can we, and staying on Facebook is just as much of a choice as leaving is.

Like any habit, when you give it up you need to replace it with something else. This seems to be the trickiest
part of the equation, especially when the habit provides value on some level. What we'd like is an alternative
that is "healthier" for us (giving up candy for smoking hardly makes sense). Over the last two days, Google has
had its annual I/O Conference up in SF. One of the panels was with part of Google's Social Web Team. During the
talk, Dewitt Clinton said that "he would rather have a federated network of a million tiny social networks rather
than one with a billion users."

So maybe instead of an alternative, we have many alternatives. Technologies such as OAuth (and many others) allow
these alternatives to communicate, mitigating the need to trust any single company to be the steward of our
identity. Whether or not we end up going to many alternatives or a single new alternative remains to be seen,
but whatever the case it is clear that distribution is a key to where we go from here. This distribution, I think,
will take one of two forms. The first is distribution of ownership, where no there is no central entity (Facebook)
that controls our identity. The second is type is the distribution of identity itself, where no single alternative
claims be own your complete identity.

That being said, specifics are always nice. About six months ago, I deactivated (not deleted) my Facebook account.
What replaced it? A number of things, mostly obvious:
- Texting
- Twitter: I use Twitter more to consume info, either from people I know or from people that share things about what
I'm interested in (software engineering, web design, etc). Most of the people I know in person don't have a Twitter,
so I don't use it for that type of social sharing (though even if I did know more people, I'd likely have one account
for that sort of personal stuff and one public account for said usage).
- AIM/GChat
- Email: Before I reactivated my Facebook, I found myself wanting to share things with people that weren't on Twitter
or AIM, and found myself emailing them links. This felt really awkward after doing in the Facebook way for so long,
and isn't really a long term solution to sharing.

As we move away from Facebook, the chances of all your "friends" joining the same alternative are slight. This
suggests open alternatives that communicate with one another, and certainly these are coming very soon...the
summer should be a very interesting time to watch this space. In the interim, do we really need to wait for everyone
to agree before doing something? Find your 5 or 10 closest friends and decide where you go from here. See what is
out there are join in. Hell, make your own network. We as software developers and Informaticians should see this as
a perfect opportunity to hack something together with friends and have some fun. The idea isn't to build a business
or make x billion dollars (which is what we have given Zuckerberg in exchange for everything he has graciously done
for us), it is to get you thinking about what is really important to you in terms of a social network. Just as
writing helps you sort out the ideas that are in your head, writing software forces you to decide what is important
and what is superfluous.

As for Diaspora, I'm not sure I trust a bunch of hipsters from NYC any more than Facebook (kidding (sort of)).

Book the Third: Code Smells and Refactoring
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We know something is wrong. Some of you may be familiar with the term "code smell". A code smell is a reaction you
have when you are reading the source code for a program. As you are reading it, something seems wrong, but you
can't quite put your finger on it, you just know that something smells off. Almost always, a code smell is indicative
of a deeper problem. If you haven't heard the term, I'm sure the feeling is familiar.

When you come across a code smell, generally the way to get rid of it is by refactoring the program. Maybe you need
to consolidate duplicate code into a single method. Maybe you need to pull up a method into a super class and have
the subclasses delegate. Sometimes though, no matter what you do, the smell doesn't go away. In these cases,
sometimes it makes more sense to just delete the code and start over.

- Hunter

PS: Remember that scary furnace in Home Alone? Every time I post a picture or update to Facebook I can't help but
to think that I am basically adding fuel to that fire. (Image at http://brizzly.com/pic/2IT1)