Category: Announcements

I can no longer support Facebook. Until Facebook undergoes a wholesale leadership change, or better yet, has been regulated, I need to minimize or eliminate my Facebook account.

What pushed me to take action? Let’s look at some recent news:

• Facebook allowed partners to see the names of nearly all Facebook friends and read PRIVATE MESSAGES without user consent. Did you know your private messages were being shared with Facebook partners?
• Facebook executive Joel Kaplan, who sat behind Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings, has stopped efforts to fight polarization on Facebook and to reduce propaganda on the site.
• The United Nations Human Rights Council blasted Facebook for the role it played in Myanmar genocide.
• Facebook misled the public about the amount it had been used by Russian propaganda during the 2016 election.

And there are many more examples. Since Facebook’s earliest days, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly broke the trust of his users. Each time Facebook is caught, they apologize and promise it won’t happen again. But it does repeatedly. After 14 years of this cycle, we should know better.

So I’m leaving Facebook and all of the properties that Facebook owns. I’m not sure what form that will take yet—whether I will delete my accounts or just leave them unattended.

I do know that I’m going to resurrect my personal website and go back to owning my content and platform. I’m finally going to upgrade my site to participate on the modern IndieWeb. I’m also excited by what my friends Nishant and Pita are building at Digest—a social network built with privacy and user control built into it from the beginning.

I’ve given myself until the end of January to figure out the details. I’ll share what I learn in hopes it helps others leave Facebook as well.

A couple of years ago, my co-founders asked me to write more frequently on the Cloud Four blog. It was flattering to know that they trusted me to speak my mind on our collective blog and let me voice help shape our company.

Since then Cloud Four’s blog has taken off and my personal blog has languished. The last post was two years ago and it was simply a dump of bookmarks from delicious.

Several events have caused me to restart this blog:

• IndieWebCamp reshaped the way I think about content on the web and the importance of owning my own space. In many ways, I feel I own CloudFour.com as well—not the least of which is the fact that I own part of the company—but it is still a shared space. No matter how freely I can speak there, it isn’t my blog. Nor my site.
• Anil Dash recently wrote if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen and the follow up if you did blog it, it did happened. Similar to IndieWebCamp, it highlighted the importance of blogging versus the more transient nature of Twitter.
• I’ve had an opportunity to watch first hand as Luke Wroblewski and Jeremy Keith turn out numerous informative blog posts in short order. This is a muscle that needs to be exercised.
• I want to write about things that don’t make sense on the Cloud Four blog. Talking about comic books or politics or just random ideas that aren’t fully baked. There has to be a place for that too

The final impetus came from the launch of futurefriend.ly. When signing the document, we had to have somewhere to point the signatures. What made the most sense was a link to this dormant blog.

Embarrassing. It’s time to rectify that situation.

Been doing a lot of house cleaning this weekend. One of those items was moving from MediaTemple’s GridServer to a dedicated virtual server for this blog.

I doubt anyone cares about the move, but I need a post that I know is definitively on the new server and not the old server for testing purposes.

If you see this, you are looking at the new server.