Right now, I’m about 52% pro-Facebook, 48% anti-Facebook. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the social networking site has made a number of privacy changes over the course of the last year that has exposed your data to your friends, advertisers, sites and the rest of the world. Not convinced? Check out how the default privacy settings have changed over time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook — or more specifically — I love how Facebook has allowed me to connect with friends (new and old) and share ideas, content, photos and more in a clean and easy-to-use format. I stress those two points, because MySpace and Friendster were the first pioneers into this space, however Facebook took it a step further by using web 2.0 technologies and cleaning up the mess.

At this point, though, the company has made so many privacy blunders that I really want to close my account — if it weren’t for all the people I still want to keep in touch with. So, first and foremost, I recommend going through your privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb and making sure that everything is set the way you want it to be. There’s a great article over at PC World that walks through what everything means and their recommendations of how to set things up.  I strongly encourage every Facebook user to check it out.

As a next step, I also donated $10 to the new open source social network project known as Diaspora. The concept is that you host your own “seed” of the social network, which can then communicate with other “seeds” rather than having all of the data stored on one master web site. Think of it like peer-to-peer networking, where each person has a small chunk of the entire data — and each peer communicates with eachother. In this model, you host and store all the data you want to share — and you decide what level of privacy you want (how novel!). For $5, you can get a starter CD to host your own seed once it’s available. For $10, you can get the starter CD and some stickers — and I’m all about stickers. It goes up from there, with each level getting an additional perk.

If you’d like to help make a more open (but private) social networking system, head on over to Kickstarter and donate a few bucks towards Diaspora. It’s it time to start telling Facebook enough is enough?

Google just announced that their new Social Networking application known as Friend Connect is now available to the public. What it does, it allows you to “tag” yourself as a member of specific web sites and share your profile information.

I’ve added my Friend Connect box to the right had side of The Diatribe, so if you already have a Google account, you can sign in and show your support for the site. Upload your photo and your Google profile with information and start making friends.

I’m still not sure how this is going to roll out for future applications or tie into other social networks, as it’s still too new. But check it out, sign up and support The Diatribe.

Twitter is nothing new. Considered Micro-blogging, Twitter is a social networking platform that allows its users to post up to 140 characters describing “what are you doing right now?” Similar to the Facebook status message, Twitter has been around for several years, though it wasn’t until just recently that I’ve become addicted.

I’ve always written Twitter off as a silly application that has no practical usage. In the past few weeks however, I’ve gotten quite a kick out of providing my periodic updates throughout the day with random thoughts, or comments that I have to make.

There was even an article in the latest episode of Wired, which discussed how many people are shutting down their personal blogs in favor of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. The reason? Who has time to write a long, well thought-out post for a small personalized audience when you can accomplish the same thing with 140 characters interspersed throughout the day?

There are so many blogs out there nowadays that have become their own “new media.” Huffington Post, Politico, Lifehacker, and Boing Boing are just to name a few. If you are interested in reading commentary about the latest debate, doing a Google search will likely return a few top news sites mixed together with a few of the top political blogs. Your personal review of the debate is likely not to get picked up and will only be circulated amongst your small community of readers.

Have no fear, dear readers. I’m not shutting down The Diatribe. Instead, if you’re looking to get a quick fix of what Miss Possible or myself are up to. Check out our twitter feed: bseils and kseils.

Feel like trying it out for yourself? Read the FAQs and send along your user ID so we can follow you as well!