The Social Superblogospherenet

or: Why I shouldn't care about internet privacy.

Google Buzz launched to much fanfare yesterday, or maybe just to a chorus, because my RSS feed exploded with everyone reporting the same thing. "Google has entered the social networking space, Facebook is doomed, all hail our new multicolored overlords." Or something like that.

While I went ahead and clicked the link and started messing with it, my interest fell out 10 seconds later. I have Facebook. I have A Shacknews profile, Ars Technica profile, Hard|[OCP] account, and probably half a dozen others on forum/social sites. I have Blogger. I have LinkedIn. I took a look at Buzz, and it seemed like one more questionnaire form for me to fill out with all of my interests and oddities that, if you really were my friend, probably knew already.
The privacy aspect is something I'm still wrangling with. If I have something I don't want the world to know, I don't put it online. (This is a concept I hardly ever seen mentioned.) The remaining information; the music I listen to, things I read, places I go, LOLcat picture I LOLed at, all of those are things I don't care if you know or not. I figure so long as no one can social engineer my public facts into figuring out my password (you did make it a non recognizable word or date, yes?) or actually post something as dumb as my social sec. #, then there's nothing that can be really used against me.

That's not to say I advocate these organizations suddenly publishing huge lists of names and their favorite color for all to grab. Let's keep it reasonable here. But I wonder how much of my instinctual reaction not to fill in these "All about yourself" fields is really justified. It's increasingly showing to be less and less the case. At best, I hope that all of these data miners who really love sifting through this stuff will finally realize that I'm not interested in Canadian pharmaceuticals, and that they'd have much better luck trying to sell me some buckeyballs instead.

On the flip side though, I'm a completionist. And staring at that Buzz profile, with all of the empty fields, made me want to fill it out, to make it whole. But why? You guys know how to find me, you don't need to search for "internet spaceships" to get a hit on Koz. And do I want people searching for me? Are there thousands out there aching to hear what I have to say? (if they're followers of this once-in-a-fiscal yearly updated blog, they have my sympathies.) I doubt it. (Besides, being able to import my blog into Facebook has made everyone there my captive audience. =)

Networking is good, but I have a hard time wrapping my head and interest around it all. If the internet has shown me anything in the past few years, it's that there's a lot of people with a lot of things to say, and a very tiny percentage with anything I'm actually interested in.

And what about what I have to say? Inconsequence really. As a good friend pointed out to me once, it can be cathartic. We used to have diaries, but those didn't come with a comments section. Do we live for what other people have to say about what we think? Has privacy been traded for collection opinion? Vote +/- below. =P