I am happy to say that I have already completed my first and only new year’s resolution this year: getting rid of my Facebook account. It turned out to be much easier than expected, as there is a separate, easily accessible delete account page on Facebook. I just had to type my password and a captcha and that was it. Now my Facebook account is disabled, and will be permanently deleted after 14 days.

I am not a huge fan of Facebook, and the future of Facebook makes me even more sceptic. Besides all the technological lock-in issues, I have a major problem with how Facebook makes people forget that they are communicating private things in a (semi)-public space. This is also the reason I have turned off my Facebook wall. I consider Facebook a public communication channel, but I have experienced that many others use it for more private communication.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that University of Oslo now openly supports RSS- and Twitter-feeds from the official employee web sites. Now I see that social linking has also been embedded in the new profile, as can be seen for example here. These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.

University of Oslo is brushing up the web pages this year, and now the turn has come to my department. When I updated my official profile I found (to my big surprise) that it is possible to include RSS and Twitter feeds. Wow, not bad, not bad at all! I am very happy that the university sees the possibilities in promoting blogging and social fora among the staff. Another good thing is that publications are now automatically extracted from Frida, the Norwegian publication database that we have to use.