People are quitting Facebook.  Though it seems the cyber-crack of our Internet age is proving difficult for millions to let go of. If you’re embracing the concept of quitting facebook and giving up your daily check-ins on your newsfeed, I have a question for you: Why stop there? I ran a little experiment about a year ago on Twitter. A co-worker of mine with a sharp mouth had a bad habit of tweeting before thinking. In fact, one of her opinionated tweets brought some legal problems to the agency I was working for at the time. She didn’t change her ways however, and continued to tweet whatever came to mind. She posted a tweet one day that was private corporate information and not suitable for public consumption on Twitter. She was told to delete it and did so promptly. The tweet was only on her Twitter page for a few hours. I had previously subscribed to her Twitter feed via RSS and was able to read the stream on Google Reader without having to go to Twitter. Knowing the post had been deleted, out of curiosity, I scrolled through her previous tweets to discover that even the tweets she had deleted from her Twitter page were still available on the RSS feed.

There’s a lesson in this story. Your posts, your info, your pictures and your videos are out there and they’re staying out there. You can delete all you want. You can migrate your whole web life to another web app with a better privacy policy. Just remember, whoever wants it already has it and in some cases, it never really goes away. It reminds me of that line from the original Fast and the Furious movie when Vin Diesel’s character – Dom says, “…I had Jesse run a little background check on you, Mr. Brian Earl Spilner. He can find anything on the web, anything about anyone. So, why bullshit?” Truer words were never spoken Vin.

Don’t post anything that you don’t want anyone out there to know. Think twice about posting those bikini pictures from Cancun and please don’t drink and post.  By all means, if you want to join the group that has made a commitment to quit Facebook by May 31^st, you should definitely do that. The privacy debate that has circled around Facebook in last few months really just underscores the “what” more than the “where”.

I’ve been hearing a lot speculation over how people will ultimately use their ipads. Only time will tell how user behaviour will change in the adoption of this new device. What we’re finding already on the jail-broken ipads is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s unlikely we’ll be toting the ipad around everywhere we go as we do our iphones but for long trips, it’s the ultimate companion.

I suspect books, newspapers, magazines, comic books and video will be the content family of choice when users bring it along.  For those who feel conflicted and wonder if they might miss their netbook or laptop…well, there’s an app for that.

Check out this video of the ipad as a laptop using a bluetooth mouse: