Staff at Facebook spend their well-remunerated time dreaming up new ways to entice users to part with their hard-earned personal information so the site can target brilliant adverts to each one of its 600 million or so users.

It's a succesful strategy and next door neighbour Google wants a piece of the pie, launching its own get-rich-quick social network site Google+.

Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg was obviously keen to see what the competition's up to and joined the service when it launched, quickly becoming the most followed person on the site.

Well, he was, until he made his profile private, in a move laden with delicious, creamy irony. For Facebook, you see, has had a problem with privacy. Namely, yours. It didn't want to give it to you without a fight.

Enhanced privacy could mean fewer pieces of information to pass on, and less bait to entice advertisers, so the site makes being private particularly tough and new services are always open by default, with privacy hidden away deep in the settings.

But Zuckerberg, it seems, likes his own privacy, and is jolly glad therefore that Google thought to stick some privacy settings in so he could disappear to the corners of the site, watching his rival from within its own belly. Creepy.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, Google's own top Google+ users - Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president of social networking (still not the mayor, he needs to check-in more) - have also gone private.

They sucker us in with promise of ever-lasting happiness, then hide away to watch their devious plans unfold. Guys, come back. Sneak needs more friends!

13 Jul 2011