ReadWriteWeb

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on social media, especially Facebook.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse, it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

Out with the old, in with the new. One of the “old” ways of thinking that finally kicked the bucket in 2011? That users could get a free ride on Web services with no catch. As Robert Heinlein famously said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). This realization isn’t new for some, but the realization should finally be kicking in for mainstream users as well.

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

Men are more likely than women to turn to Facebook and other social networks for healthcare purposes, according to a survey by accounting firm PwC.

Not surprisingly, the survey of 1,000 adults found that younger people were more likely to use social media than older people for healthcare purposes. Overall, nearly a third of respondents, and 50 percent of those under the age of 35, had used social media for healthcare purposes, which can range from registering a complaint to looking up informational videos on YouTube.

The PwC report concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers, saying that healthcare is "no longer social media's wallflower." At the same time, however, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors all limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media to make decisions.

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing, using everything from basic feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then has grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to HTML5. Facebook's creed, really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once, run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got where it is now and how it will iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

New data from Hitwise shows that Facebook is the top-searched term in the U.S. for the third year in a row. It accounted for 3.1% of all searches, up 46% from last year. Four variations on "Facebook" were also among the top 10 terms, accounting for 4.42% of all searches. "Facebook login" was the third most-searched term of 2011, followed by "craigslist" and "facebook.com." The search term "www.facebook.com" came in eighth place after "yahoo" and "ebay."

This year wasn't the first time any of us heard about the impact of social media on television. People have talked about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter for about as long as those social networks have existed, and the trend has only accelerated as social media usage in general has exploded.

Last year, chatter on Twitter helped the MTV Video Music Awards boost its audience to the biggest it had been in eight years. In 2011, services like Twitter and Facebook served as the virtual water cooler for just about every major news story and broadcast media event. It may not have been invented this year, but 2011 was pivotal for social TV.

Just days ago, Barack Obama officially announced the end of the Iraq War. Today Facebook launched its social media guide for military families, which outlines how family members can connect with loved ones who are stationed far away. To find it on Facebook, go here. This guide provides tips for staying in touching via Facebook, detailed information about uploading photos, status updates, sending messages, groups and pages and using chat and video chat.

Military personnel and their families must be extra careful of the types of information they share. The social media guide outlines ways to maintain operational security (OpSec), which is essential for all service members and their families.

Alicia posted an infographic today that showed how most people Friend on Facebook. Are you close to the 'friends' you have on Facebook. Are they really friends or random folks you've connected with at some point in your life?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

New research from Nielsen's NM Incite reveals that knowing someone in real-life is the number one reason people friend them on Facebook. Of the 1,865 adult social media users surveyed, 82% reported that they friend people they know in real life and 41% cite "don't know well" as the top reason for Facebook unfriending people. How does this data size up against Facebook's purported purpose of "helping build closer ties among friends"?