Editor’s note: I’ve discussed this kind of topic recently, but I think it’s worth bringing up again.

I’ve said a few things about Facebook privacy before here. I don’t want to belabor the point made by Jason Calacanis and on Diggnation, but there is something bigger going on here, bigger than just Facebook, to discuss.

Facebook has been moving more and more to resemble the always public services such as Twitter, Flickr, and others. The controversy mainly stems from the history of Facebook being a private service with your information only facing towards your friends. Great, sounds good. But as so much of this information is public and searchable by people outside of your circle of friends, there are some issues to consider.

My point is: If I give all my information out to Facebook, or even Twitter, or even this blog for my friends to see. We friend each other and discuss different topics and catch up on the latest we’re doing. Fine, great, sign me up. The real issue going on here is when companies use this information to fine tune their marketing. If you take away the part of social media that is your friends and contacts, it really just becomes a feeding ground for marketers. In reality though of using these services, we get the benefit of keep up with our friends and sharing what we are doing. If you consider that next time you tweet or status update or whatever, it will make you ask: am I sharing something useful to friends or am I just feeding the marketing department of some company?

While, yes, I would rather see ads that are relevant to things I care about, I worried that Facebook is seeing us, the user, as a point of data to be used for advertising dollars and missing the mark of the people using the service. I know I’ve said this before, but at what to degree will this go on?

Social media sites will come and go, I don’t know if the problem is necessarily Facebook right now as it is the culture of over-sharing. Yes, Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing, but as public-ness becomes more and more a part of our society, maybe it’s time to really rethink how much we share. The tool isn’t just the problem it’s us.

Is it just me, or has Facebook lost it’s soul? The whole original premise of the site was a perfect storm for success: college students, later non-students easily able to connect with each other around the world. Great, sign me up! As with any Internet startup, there comes a point where they need to grow. They need to prove to investors and the mainstream that they are not simply a curiosity. I believe, for Facebook, it was around they introduced the Fan pages (which are now “Liking” something, same thing with different vocabulary). Fan pages gave business’, non-profits, groups, clubs, etc a platform to broadcast their message out to a lot of people at once. While in principal this is the same premise as Twitter, this was fully integrated into Facebook’s walled garden.

In order to keep up with future of the open web, Twitter, and being more visible in Google search, Facebook began experimenting with unlocking our data. First it was the confusing privacy settings, the accidental public settings for the photo albums, and now to the latest: the profile/fan page linking. In the age of the Internet, where free and openness reigns, business can take more and more advantage of this public data. I believe this is the idea behind Facebook’s ongoing destruction of it’s own walled garden. It also doesn’t help that the privacy settings require a PhD to deciefer. The more Facebook goes down this path of opening for the sake of business and leaving their original base of people connecting with other people, I feel they are loosing the magic of what originally made Facebook so popular.