Dan's New Blog

I’m not a big fan of Jason Calacanis. But he’s written an interesting piece on how he believes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whom he calls “an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur” has overplayed his hand:

“Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially ‘out,’ as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are — simply put — not trustworthy.”

In my house, I’m very wary of FB. My wife, even more so. She’s opted out entirely. (She’d rather obsess about her own blog instead. Ask her how many people from Croatia visited it last week. Go ahead. Seriously.) But my 2 kids are addicted. They don’t care about trustworthiness.

Calacanis provides us with handy lists of (a) the people Zuckerberg has back-stabbed over the past 5 years in his march to world domination, and (b) a dozen articles from last week about how Facebook is the devil. (Or the antichrist. Whatever.) Anyway my favorite quote is this:

“The more we feed the monster that is Facebook, the more we lose.”

Now I’ve heard the same thing said about Google. But it never rang true for Google like it does for Facebook. And as I keep saying to anyone who’ll listen:

“I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about — hey, if I want to know that you just came in from walking the dog, I’ll call you — in return for personal data that they’re soooo hot to monetize.”

Calacanis mentions that gdgt’s “Peter Rojas and [Google's] Matt Cutts have turned off their Facebook pages, and more intelligent people everywhere are talking about doing so.” I’m not Matt Cutts. Nor am I “more intelligent” — whatever that means. But I’m thinking I’m gonna go that route as well.

We’ll see.