Evil facebook?

Facebook got a lot of attention last week with a little democratic exercise about users defining the terms of service. Or rather voting for two alternatives, and being involved in how things should be managed in general. I heard that both alternatives we rather evil. To me the problem seems to be that the social network is evolving towards a monopoly. It is not a natural monopoly since most of the services have been there for quite a while and the technology is there for connecting the contacts with those existing services elsewhere.

I think the right thing to do in order to avoid the evilness is clearly diversifying. I reckon facebook is very good at handling contacts, and should be used to keep contacts, but other services should be pursued elsewhere. Here's a little recipe:

1. get a youtube account to share video, or if (understandably) afraid of google get a blip.tv account

2. get a twitter account for status updates

3. get a flickr account for photo sharing

4. get back to plain email for communication

5. get a delicious account or use google reader for sharing web content.

6. share music on last.fm or blip.fm

If you need to put it all in a single place, get a blog or just post the links on the wall. There's a facebook facility to connect some services to the facebook notification engine, and I think that's fine as long as the content is kept elsewhere.