Facebook used to be about your personal life, and more and more it’s about your public life.

This trend really sucks. Maybe some people never had that experience with Facebook, but I completely understand what the author is saying. Four years ago, Facebook was a special place to connect with your friends. You could plan events, post pictures, and have conversations (walls were mainstream, low-frequency alternative to AIM). No Farmville, no “Sharing”, no “Like” button; just you, your friends, and your lives.

Then, it changed. Somewhere down the line, it stopped being about your real friends and starting being about your “friends”.

Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in privacy on Facebook, but I don’t believe that we can truly be ourselves if everyone is watching (some of us, anyway). If your friends wrote stupid stuff on your wall, it used to be endearing; nowadays, it’s a prime candidate for deletion in the fear that it could cause some collateral damage at work. Where did the friendship part of Facebook go?

Facebook isn’t about you and your friends anymore. It’s just about you, or at least whoever you want to show to the world. Don’t get me wrong, having Facebook act as a glorified White Pages is pretty useful: we can find our old friends and keep track of those we just met. If we want to get to know them better, there are other channels. It’s just that the system, partly because of Facebook and partly because of society at large, no longer condones real friendships on the internet.

In fact, Facebook no longer even tries to connect me with my friends. According to the suggestions sidebar, here’s the new goal:

Heartwarming.