I Deactivated My Facebook Account! Liberated!!!

After months of frustration with all the Facebook changes, as well as the constant changes (without notifications) to account settings, and making it a constant pain with keeping my account privacy settings locked down – I have decided to deactivate my FB account.  And it feels so great!  I equate it to the feeling I had after working at Microsoft for almost 10 years and finally used a Mac for the first time!  It was such a refreshing revelation!  My next computers at home are going to be Macs, and I love my iPhone and iPad.  As for Facebook, its become a constant stream of privacy issues with the company and I think it just goes back to the “hacker” mentality with its founder.

If you want to get an appreciation for all that is written on FB privacy issues, just Google Facebook Privacy Issues and see what kind of interesting postings and FTC investigations and charges you will find.

See you on LinkedIn or Twitter!

Facebook App Toolkit for Windows Azure

If you are planning to build and host a highly scalable Facebook application, check-out this new toolkit built by Thuzi in collaboration with Microsoft to give the community a good starter kit for getting Facebook apps up and running in Windows Azure.  Developing your Facebook applications in .Net and hosting them in Windows Azure provides a flexible and scalable cloud computing platform for those applications.

Check out this blog post by the Microsoft ISV team to learn more about how to get started launching your own viral social networking applications today – hosted on Windows Azure!  You can also go directly to CodePlex and download the kit here.

Silicon Valley Incubation Week at Microsoft

This week, Microsoft is hosting a week-long event that supports startups and students at the Microsoft Technology Center in Silicon Valley. You can view the progress in action at the Incubation Week Facebook site.

Participants receive one day of training and three days of active prototyping and development time on their chosen application. The final day consists of packaging and reporting to a panel of judges.

The week-long event promises to open up the possibilities of both students and startups.

Microsoft’s Fascination / Investment in Facebook

I thought I would think about the “deal” a couple of days before sharing my thoughts.  I will let you digest the details, but essentially, we invested $240 million to gain a small stake in Facebook (1.6 percent of the 15 billion valuation) and we would expand our current advertising partnership. 

First, I think its of value to understand the “social network” experience on Facebook.  I have been a Facebook user for several months, with friends and colleagues on my friends list.  I have joined groups with some of them, wrote on each other’s walls, changed my status on occasion, even dared poking a friend.  I have added some applications (like Pandora) as well.  But, I have still not had the – “wow, this is amazing” experience, that “ah ha moment”.  I am not sure I have personally experienced the value of Facebook for me.  Joe Wilcox points out that at about 50 million users on Facebook, and a valuation of $15 billion, that it puts a value of each user at about $300!  Really…I just don’t see how that value is extracted or realized in just connecting with friends.  MySpace for $580 million now seems like a great bargain!

So, why make the investment?  Is it all about advertising and eyeballs?  Certainly, that is a big part of it.  But could it be more than that?  Could it be Facebook’s platform? 

I was recently meeting with a customer that discussed the announcement with me and postulated on the possibilities between Microsoft SharePoint Server, Windows Live, and Facebook.  Interesting…