Broken Facebook

Facebook's RSS notes importer has been broken on and off for months now, and it's totally hosed for me. I try to get it to import and it says there's no feed or it throws up a generic error page. Last week, it would get as far as reading the feed for confirmation, only to throw the error page after that. It's annoying.

And the thing is, I don't generally care if anyone I don't know is reading my blog, but I kind of like it when my friends do. And since my real life friends all use Facebook, and they're going there daily anyway, it's super convenient for them to read it there. Sadly, this arrangement is wholly broken when Facebook is broken.

That's an interesting problem, by the way... there's a single point of failure now in the world of online social networking. It's that pervasive now in our lives, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. You can't get your friend data out of the site, and that sucks.

A part of me would really like to see a truly private site that's something like FB. I mean, the same idea, with photos and status and whatever, but zero public facing anything. If you're in it, no one knows until they're in it as well, and they look for you there. The default should be you don't share anything with anyone except your friends. Someone should build something like that, and make it so your content is truly your own to take elsewhere, if you so choose.