I already felt old and tired this morning, having stayed up late to attend a Deer Tick concert in Portland. I'd had my fill of young hipsters in Portland. When I rolled out of bed this morning (late), I had to deal with the young hipsters of f8.

I wasn't able to drink coffee quickly enough to muster the enthusiasm to join Zuckerberg in celebrating his joyful takeover of the Interwebz nor to grab the pitchforks to storm the Facebook barricades to demand a free and open web, wrestled beyond the control of one company that wants to share my "likes" with every goddamn website I visit.

Yesterday I wrote a post on RWW about Twitter's announcement last week that all public tweets since the service's inception were headed to the Library of Congress. My hope is that those in the digital humanities can help shape the archiving of Twitter and other social streams. Although people scoff at the idea that all Twitter is is a series of folks extolling the virtues of whatever brand of cereal with which they started their day, but hey -- plenty of dissertations have been written on the cultural anthropology of breakfasts, I'm sure, and if that's all Twitter was (if you ignore the Iranian revolution, the political discussions, the real-time reporting of natural disasters, and yes even the Justin Bieber adoration), I'd still say that there's plenty there worthy of archiving and analysis.

And so, yes, I am excited at the possibility of the data from Facebook being more accessible. I'm always curious about these claims Facebook makes that "folks who share are happier." Hundreds of millions of us use Facebook. If we connect and friend and share and like, then much like Twitter, there is a wealth of information for us to analyze in terms of who we are, who we know, what we think, what we care about.

I'm happy telling my friendly neighborhood ethnographer some of these things, but I'm just not sure I want every application developer and every website manager to know where I went to high school or what I think about Johnny Depp. And while I'm fairly well equipped to protect my privacy online (despite my penchant for TMI while blogging), I do worry about the "average user" -- what are they unwittingly going to hand over (besides name, address, email address, phone number, religious and political affiliation, educational background, current workplace, of course).

I find myself torn between sounding the freak-out alarm (I'm not sure why, but I have visions of Marshall Kirkpatrick screaming "Soylent green is people!") and being calm and supportive of folks who are just now joining social media networks. I want folks to be smart, play nice... share. I think that the social connections and learning networks we can build via technology will be powerful. But I also find Facebook incredibly creepy.

I posted a link on my Facebook page this evening to the Facebook developer wiki, in an attempt to demonstrate the information returned by a "Users.getInfo" query. Whether or not friends will see it in between updates on lost Farmville cows and Mafia Wars hits remains to be seen.