Excellent points!

Sometimes, having an avenue closed by legislation can spark inventiveness and lead to new opportunities. In some ways I am quite glad that (for instance) we are excluded from hosting with Google, Microsoft or Amazon, because it opens up a bit of the field for companies within national borders, which is good for diversity and so for innovation.

It can be a bit odd though. For instance, I administer a site in Australia that is made for schoolkids (yes, we do need to think of them!) which has to be hosted there thanks to Oz privacy laws, but, of course, the packets passing back and forth across the Pacific as I administer the site are likely going via the US and winding up here on my machine in Canada. I am, naturally, using an encrypted connection for this but it does seem a bit strange that (say) I could not simply encrypt the data on the disk itself and host it in the US.

I find it amusing how much people get upset when their information is leaked after they made it readily available. Not all information requested has to be provided and the ones you do provide you can by coy about them. I am not saying this to condone the illegal phishing of data nor the US blatant disregard to need of asking before collecting.

My humble opinion is that fear has been constantly used as the driving force behind the need for law agencies to collect data. “If you don’t have anything to hide then you shouldn’t mind”, I am not sure why someone would say something like this knowing that one of the most treasured thing to someone is his/her privacy.

The fact of the matter is if you want to live in this century and use all the little gadgets and “stay on the grid” then there has to be some compromise. Be mindful of where you enter your data, Research on new technologies and see if you want to be a part of it. 

Yes, that monopolization is the worry! The problem is that Facebook's members are not its clients, but its shareholders, and it is ruthless and highly effective in exploiting its deep and powerful knowledge of what drives social networking. Very clever, but very harmful. I am deeply saddened by the way that, as a result of its market share and almost single-handedly, Facebook has squashed open standards (e.g. OpenSocial, OpenID, even RSS). It's not just a result of its own aggressive use of proprietary and closed alternatives, but the fact that, as a result, it has forced other sites of its nature to become equally closed in order to compete: it has become the acceptable norm to lock people in. 

Personal reflection: I used hi5 long ago to keep in touch with friends from back home. I moved to Canada after high school and had to find a better way to keep in touch with my friends who were moving out all over the world. Social sites comes in very handy for that. Hi5 was a great way to stay in touch as it mainly worked as a method of communication across the world just like yahoo and msn messengers. 

social apps have evolved greatly since then. Facebook is a great combination of content and communication and everything in between. While looking thru the wiki posts you shared I found Andrew Odlyzko's 'Content is not king' to be very interesting. I would argue this is a personal view but I know people who solely uses facebook for communication. Others are more in it for the content both from known and unknown sources. 

About the article about how people think facebook is internet is also very true. Just like some people uses computers now a days just for youtube and facebook, nothing else seems to exist in their online world other than funny videos and friend's posts. Telecom companies were also using this to give people access to certain social apps on their smartphone and not all of internet and claiming that as a feature and charging people. I am sure some some people still think when they click on the internet explorer icon on their desktop that it the internet. Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE

Remember the time Skype came up with a phone which was a revolution. Though it didn't sell well but it was a great idea as lot of people were buying into the idea of skype. Just like that facebook has also taken over onternet. We have seen the facebook phone whose main purpose was to keep you online in facebook 24/7. if you go to http://failblog.cheezburger.com/failbook you will find a lot of people asking questions, googling things, reading news, believing fake news and sharing user generated content that are absurd. 

Facebook has done a great job changing the world into this. There data business is the biggest in the world but even the people that knows this can not stop using facebook. No other company has such grasp on userbase that other social apps are incapable of reaching that. The world runs on money and ethics has to room in it. Facebook and any other large internet companies are no different. 

Yes - there's no doubt that they do their job ruthlessly well! But, just because the world needs money does not make money an end (or a justification) in itself. We have laws to prevent its precedence over ethics, albeit unevenly spread, not to mention other powerful drivers like social capital and altruism.

Facebook is a bit different, I think. Though plenty of other companies have found ways to lock people in with foundational technologies (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, IBM) and some have found ways to offer services that can't be beat and that dominate through little more than having desirable products that smaller companies cannot match (e.g. Google, Amazon, Netflix), all of those could relatively easily be replaced with a competitor's products. One might have invested a lot in content, infrastructure, etc so it would not be easy, but it could be done. That's one of the great things about the Internet as a substrate. Facebook was the first to truly get how to create lock-in with social networks on an open Internet, doing what Bell only managed in a bygone era by controlling the wires. On the surface it looks like it has a lot of direct competitors - and there are indeed niches to be carved - but they have no more chance of competing than other US phone companies at the start of the 20th Century could compete with Bell, without government intervention. We don't have the legal checks and balances to figure out how to control such things yet, but it would be interesting to think about what they might look like!

"A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cyberspace."

"The implementation platform is relatively unimportant."

"It was clear that we were not in control."

"is an Avatar an extension of a human being"

"You can't trust anyone."

Registered!

Thank you!

Sasa