Blake Dowling
Do you use Facebook for your business, lobbying firm, campaign for not running for Mayor or just personal use?
If so, read on.
Have you seen an endless stream of news about the social media site?
Such issues as pay-to-play for who sees what posts, ad prices going way up, millions of users data lost to Cambridge Analytica, fake sites/users promoting discourse on all sides of the political arena during the last election?
As far as the latest, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress this week, giving us a front-row seat of where this all goes.
I have heard a lot of folks saying they are done with Facebook. Well, about 87 million FB users will get a notice this week that means something to the effect of, your data may have been misplaced, etc.
This will appear in your news feed, so keep an eye out for it.
Also, if you see this note, read it and follow the instructions about privacy settings for other apps. You can take some control over where your data is shared, so make sure to do so if you are planning on continuing to use the Facebook platform.
In my opinion, I am not prepared to get rid of it.
If you think about the massive amount of information you can gather in a few minutes, it is mind-boggling.
In a 10 minute view, I saw my old friend Hadderman is at the Masters, former Gators Coach Jim McElwain took a loss on his Gainesville house to help a family with disabled children (according to the Tampa Bay Times), friends Emmett Reed and Jason Gonzalez assisted a young man in Bimini during a shark attack; Peter Schorsch’s comments on a bizarre sermon ( which I agree 100 percent), a gazillion (very important) Springtime Tallahassee pictures; plus, the sponsored post on the new Lost in Space, wow, actually looks pretty smooth.
I usually don’t post anything too serious on FB; pics of the family and columns are about it.
But some people lay it all out there; if you choose to do so, great, my friend Jim shared a pic of his mom’s old car and a very sad bumper sticker.
As for the island of Bimini mentioned earlier, I am a big fan of the place. Did you know Martin Luther King Jr. wrote some speeches there? I didn’t know that, even after visiting the destination about 20 times. But someone shared it on FB, and I picked up that fascinating piece of knowledge.
I have written several pieces on the island and, in fact, I anxiously await info on the release of a documentary I worked on last year there with filmmaker Bradley Beesley and the team at Costa.
They checked out my column at Florida Politics about the island and flew me down for several days of filming. It was a blast, and you have to check out Beesley’s other work, he is a great talent.
So, let’s see how the testimony goes, as well as new rules FB is putting in place to protect our data; maybe when it comes to advertising for elections, posting amazing pics, promoting business and publishing columns, FB will surprise us and improve the user experience.
Or, maybe they will continue down the dark path toward irrelevancy. I am indeed willing to wait and see.
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Blake Dowling is CEO of Aegis Business Technologies; he can be reached at [email protected].
