[putasidemobile]

Related: Please Facebook, let me peek over your walled garden. Taking a privacy-friendly stance, with the current Facebook, hurts my social life.

I do not trust your company, and I think you are bound to act unethically in the future. But I do not ask you to become a trustworthy ethical company. Mess with the accounts of my friends all you want. I just want to be invited to the next BBQ. People have stopped using e-mail for announcing these social events, and _all_ use Facebook. Could it be possible for me to not be on Facebook, yet still stay up-to-date on what my friends, or hell, even my parents now, are doing? A more advanced social graph API that hooks into email, RSS, Twitter, whatever... ?

I'm sure you also have my email-address from the address books of my contacts, so you could verify me.

As one of your longest non-users (I remember when TheFacebook required a Harvard-email for invite), please let me become a semi-user. It won't pay you a dime, but it will make the world a better place.

[mcpherrinm]

Facebook users can invite non-Facebook users by email to events, if they want to.

But for viewing what your friends and parents are doing on Facebook? Well, they could change their privacy settings to be public, but that would hurt their privacy. You want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account. What does that even mean? Do you just not want to have a password? There's no rule you have to post any content, if you just want to view other's.

[putasidemobile]

> Facebook users can invite non-Facebook users by email to events, if they want to.

This stops after a while. Even when you stay a pleasant person, you'll always be "that guy" requiring an extra action to contact. The social ripple/ping of an event stays inside Facebook.

> You want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account.

In the ideal form this would be a totally open protocol (with backing of Facebook, Google, ... and W3C).

In the current form, I do not know enough about Facebook to suggest a good system. Yes. I want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account or be under Facebook TOS. If that is meaningless at the moment, maybe we should make it mean something.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Facebook users can invite non-Facebook users by email to events, if they want to.

They can, but they generally don't.

[dublinben]

This is a social problem, not a technical problem. Encourage your social group to not use proprietary walled-gardens to plan and publicize their events. They'll all be better off for it.

[putasidemobile]

I'd say it is a battle, and a battle that is won by Facebook. I now want to surrender, but with a little dignity.

You won't convince your social group to delete their Facebook account. You may, however, convince them that you are not cool.

I'll probably take the other advice, open a new account, use a week for invites, turn on email-updates, and bite the bullet.

[dublinben]

I didn't have to convince anyone, but most of my friends are already off Facebook. For years, I've lead by example through organizing events via other means, and contacting all interested parties directly. You don't have to convince them to delete their account, just to not use it for organizing events.

[Jemmeh]

Just sign up and never post any content to it.

They'll still get -some- data off you, but frankly it's a lot of the same data they would get even if you didn't have an account.

[davmre]

I'm fairly sure you can just create a facebook account and enable email notifications. You'll never have to log in or upload any personal information, but you'll receive an email whenever you friends invite your placeholder account to an event.