Our friends keep inviting us to join Facebook. They’re all there, merrily keeping each other posted as to what they’re up to, while we stay on the outside, out of  the loop.

So feeling tempted, I sought a concise and unbiased assessment of the Facebook phenomenon, and settled for Wikipedia. It was there that I was reminded of the reasons we’ve shied away from social networking sites in general.

On this blog, we have full control over the content of the page you see (at least to the degree that I’m capable of wrangling this beast). On a social networking page, the host site may pollute your page with ads. They may comb the content of your conversations for hints on what ads you might “respond” to.

Worse, the history of Facebook is a long litany of breakdowns and outages resulting in the exposure of personal data. We also have a problem with the way they’ve played fast and loose with privacy policy.

Maybe at some point Facebook will evolve into a more stable platform. Some day they may have more respect for the personal content they’re entrusted with. If that day ever comes, we’ll reconsider our position on Facebook.

Until then, if you want to keep up on us, you’ll have to do it right here. And if we’re not forthcoming enough, you could actually send us a message and ask us a question. It may be Old School, but it works.

UPDATE – October 28, 2011: Every once in a while, we get close to caving in to the pressure to get a Facebook account. Then we read stuff like this…
Facebook says 600,000 account logins compromised every day