In Time’s Person of the Year 2010 article on Mark Zuckerberg, one fact shouts out to me above all others: 1 in 4 Web pages in the United States is now viewed behind the walls of Facebook.

      I enjoy Facebook and would be happy spending a quarter of my Web life there, if I could leave Facebook for the other 75%. But even if I log out completely, most of the Web’s most popular sites are tied to Facebook, through Share or Like or Connect buttons. Facebook is not just another Web site: it is a service that “Facebookizes” every Web site it touches, making me bring all of my friends with me, like luggage. It’s disconcerting being on a Web site that I’m used to browsing anonymously, and seeing my friends’ faces there. And so I have a holiday wish: Facebook, let me dance if I want to, let me leave my friends behind.

      For the last twenty years, we’ve enjoyed One Web that is united through the common policy of letting us be whoever we want to be, wherever we go. One Web allows us at times to be cooler than we are in real life, aspirational, anonymous, and/or fanatical about a particular subject. And that is why the Web is wonderful.

      Over the last five years, Facebook added a new hat to the One Web haberdashery, by giving us the ability to be a person who is a friend online with the people we have known in real life (as well as people we’ve never met). In 2010 Facebook added Instant Personalization, with the explicit goal of letting us be our Facebook selves everywhere. But in so doing, we have lost the On/Off button: I love being my Facebook self some places, but how do I turn it off on-the-fly?

      This presents an opportunity for Facebook to give back to the Web: please let us take off our Facebook hats whenever we want by replacing the Connect button with an On/Off button that lets us see clearly whether we are being Facebookized on any given page of the Web.

      One Web is as old as the Web itself: The 1993 New Yorker joke was that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. But now you can’t go anywhere without people knowing your pedigree, where you went to obedience school, and the status of your latest puppy love.

      What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, I don’t know how you roll… but I personally spend a lot of my time on the Internet doing things that I’m not ashamed of in principle, but don’t want broadcast to my mom, former schoolmates, and coworkers. Mostly I’d just bore them to tears because almost nobody I know gives a rat’s ass about my obsessive love of Logan Couture of the San Jose Sharks, Showtime TV shows like LOOK, or photos of panda babies. But also… I admit that I waste a lot of time on the Web when I “should” be doing other things. If you put together all the time I’ve spent just looking up song lyrics, watching videos of kittens, and studying cupcake recipes—all perfectly innocent and life-affirming activities, I might add—some small-minded people might think badly of me.

      So imagine that every time you looked at any Web page, Facebook could tell all your friends what you were looking at in real time. Would you be OK with that? From a technical point of view, Facebook could do it right now. They have the data from a large percentage of the top websites; they just aren’t exposing it yet. When we talk about the benefits of anonymity, for the average person it amounts to their boss not knowing how much time they’re spending on fantasy football or shoe shopping at work. (Vibram Five Fingers for the win!)

Source from TechCrunch