amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

Facebook always has been a stalkers dream.

I mean where else can I find out that my friend Diana changed her relationship status online and later get notified about it on my Friend Feed so I can confront her about it in real life?

The truth is that most things don’t end up on my friend feed. With so many things going on with so many friends stuff doesn’t show up on it or is delayed by many hours or sometimes days.

Not anymore though.

Now I can stalk my friends in real time or be stalked in real time.

Open a chat window with a person and let it sit… anytime they do anything on the site from replying to a group, add an application, change a status or anything else that shows up on the minifeed it shows up in the chat window for them in real time.

My good friend Abraham and I were looking at the Facebook chat and he added an application. It of course told me he had did this in the chat window

It was a bit creepy to be honest with you. I mean yeah I could have seen that information on his profile later but having it tell me in real time would be a stalkers dream.

Not to mention that if I hit the little X next to the item on my minifeed it still often times shows up on the large friend feed on the Facebook home section.

With the new chat reporting in nearly real time even if I hit the X as fast as I can anyone who has a chat window open with me at the time will still be able to see exactly what I did.

Is this really providing any new information that I can’t get from the site. No. Is this new way of showing me information a bit creepy? Yes.

I can just imagine people opening chat windows with other people and just letting them sit to later go back and see what all they did that day. Granted to get the info to show up you have to message them so a simply “hello” will sufice. Then just leave the chat window open and start collecting data.

A great deal of people have written messages asking why I left MySpace.

To be honest with you I quite simply left for greener pastures and for once I can honestly say the grass really is greener on the Facebook side of the fence.

I’ve been a user of MySpace since nearly the beginning and had a great deal of friends with whom I communicated solely with through MySpace.

MySpace has a whole in the past two years has become nothing but an advertising platform for News Corporation and inundated with advertisements, a slow loading site, unreliable uptime and generally a place filled with stupidity.

Facebook has been pushing the envelope on innovation in the social networking department, has a more attractive and faster loading site, isn’t quite as bad with advertisements and organizes data in a way that MySpace has been slowly trying to emulate… and yet still failing at do so.

The change to Facebook wasn’t just a matter of the grass being greener but also for personal privacy reasons as well.

At a previous employer having MySpace was a requirement and a good way for people to get in touch with us. This also meant my profile which was previously private suddenly had a lot of people I didn’t know visiting it.

On Facebook I can control who sees what information. I realize that MySpace has been adding this feature but I still do have a bad taste in my mouth of what MySpace has become and where it is going.

MySpace constantly copies features from Facebook that are elegeant and destroys them in a way that only the MySpace team can imagine.

So yes, I’ve left MySpace for good. I won’t be updating my profile but I’ve decided to hang on to it so I can still check in with good friends every once in a while but I won’t be checking it often… if at all.