InfoTech : Facebook gets a dose of its own viral medicine

On one level, the tremors that have been caused by the rumours are a good thing: as the fiction has spread, users have started to panic. Facebook is the office water-cooler on steriods, people who know nothing ask others then they all give their unfounded opinions which take on some kind of mysterious glow of possibility then, with retelling, become regarded as truth.

Facebook fosters this, as do many social networking sites along with thousands of so-called "answer" sites, blogs, newspaper comments sections and bulletin boards spread across the web. As people strive for their increasingly brief flash of fame - Warhol's prediction of 15 minutes is now measured in fractions of a second as postings move downscreen, displaced by more recent comments on busy sites - the post ridiculous things like "I don't know the answer to that but....., just my two cents worth." Trust us, it's not worth two cents. It's not even worth the cost of the electricity to discard it.

Last week, some clever accounting suggested that Facebook might be worth USD50,000 million; its (disputed) founder Mark Zuckerberg, was named Time Magazine's man of the year for 2010 on the dubious finding that he had changed the lives of everyone around the world.

Time for the bubble to be pricked, someone thought. And chose the so-called Web 2.0, of which Facebook sees itself as the undisputed leader, to do the pricking.

Elegant and ruthless.

The story originated with Weekly World News - which is not a newspaper and writes total tosh for fun. The story at http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/27321/facebook-will-end-on-march-15th/ is obviously satire, irony and plain made up. It even kind of relates Zuckerberg to the "I want my life back" comments of a BP executive who was slammed across the USA for saying it.

But the comments on the story are instructive - to call them vacuous and stupid is overstating their calibre. For heaven's sake, people, get a life. Preferably one that involves real people and real interaction.

But in some places around the web, those Facebook users around the virtual water cooler asking the questions have been asking one that is actually very important. If Facebook were to close down, what happens to our data?

That's a very pertinent question: not only with regard to who would gain control over it if the company did suddenly close its doors (the answer is that a liquidator would and he would sell it as he saw fit) but whether user data can ever be fully deleted from Facebook.

The answer to the latter is "no." If it's ever reached into the public domain (i.e. outside the user's closely controlled "friends") then it may well have already reached the thousands of search engines - and more dubious "bots" that trawl the web and store all manner of data. Even if you delete it from Facebook, it's still stored by those third parties. Imagine that you produce a photo of your bum on the photocopier at the office party and someone makes an additional copy, then replicates it and sticks it up all over town. Try as you might, you will never be sure who has seen it nor who has kept a copy nor, even, that you have taken down all those copies that were posted. Worse, unlike those photocopies left out in the rain, the digital copies will never degrade.

It's not just Facebook: the US National Library is indexing every Twitter tweet ever posted. There is no mechanism for removing them from that library even if they are removed from Twitter. Now Google is also indexing Twitter and others will follow.

Facebook is not shutting down in the middle of March. That it is is a lie. But it's one that, at last, might just raise the awareness of the consequences of unrestrained use of that service and other social media.