Facebook is changing. Last week, users logging in to the site were met with a little box that asked them to take a look at their privacy settings. After much discussion and a go-round with the Canadian government, the service has completely reworked its all-important system for determining who sees what. It’s a sea change for a company that built itself on the premise of providing a private space for friends. Believe it or not, it may be the best thing that could have happened.

It’s easy to sneer at coffee shops. This country properly belongs to Tim Hortons, after all, which is really more of a fast-food joint in drag. Coffee shops are urban inventions: game reserves for students, layabouts, guitarists and wearers of thick-framed glasses whose primary concern at this time of year is keeping their scarves out of their lattes. If that earns the scorn of middle Canada, I hear you.

But something is afoot here: The web is teaching us to do something that decades of suburbanization and fetishizing privacy made us forget: how to live in public.

There is, without a shadow of a doubt, something profoundly disconcerting about FourSquare. It’s not even the Web service’s fault; it’s a perfectly nice piece of software. It’s more what it does – encourage users to pinpoint themselves on a map, in real time, as often as they can. It’s like Twitter, but for locations. Instead of asking the question, “What are you thinking?” FourSquare asks, “Where are you right now?” It uses your smart phone’s GPS locator to answer – and then it tells all your friends. Why? Because it’s 2009, and that’s the kind of thing we do nowadays.

iPhones on the beach, and other uses for silicon implants

If it sounds improbable that everything you’ve piled into Facebook might evaporate in ten years, then consider: one of the biggest websites of the late 90’s is about to get deleted. At the end of October, Yahoo will pull the plug on GeoCities, the service that over a million people used to set up webpages late in the last century. On October 27, the whole thing will simply cease to exist. It will, as we say in the industry, go poof.

One of the surest ways to pop a vein in your head is to overthink a meme.

Why, for instance, is the Internet flooded with riffs on Kanye West’s infamous awards-show implosion? Why has this supplanted a video of a cat playing the piano? Why ask why? You’ll bring yourself confusion and grief, and waste valuable time that you could have spent photoshopping pictures of Kanye West.

Never mind the retro oddness of calling people who consume culture “users.” And never mind the double oddness of a group representing writers getting jittery about the presence of too many readers. It’s clear that “users” are out in force, and that’s going to change the copyright equation in ways that still aren’t clear.

Finally, in turbulent times, a proposition that everyone can agree on: the folks who think Barack Obama was really born in Kenya are crazy! Completely, shining, barking, howling, nutburger crazy. And what perfect timing! It’s August, and a restless proletariat clamours for entertainment.