I'd say this is too little, too late, but not in the obvious way.
People are not leaving Facebook en masse right now, nor will they likely any time soon. But the Facebook vs. privacy meme has broken into the mainstream—I mean, it's literally on the cover of Time. Whether they realize it or not, a lot of people are reacting to this. They won't do anything as drastic as quitting Facebook, but they'll become more self-conscious. They'll start to post a little less and text a little more.
There won't be a Facebook exodus. Just a gradual weaning-off by users who don't even know they care about privacy, but are simply reacting viscerally to a vague mistrust of the company. Facebook won't implode, it'll just become less relevant. Like Yahoo, it'll be around for some time to come, but just as most of us haven't expected competitive search results from Yahoo for years, most of us will never really expect Facebook to safeguard any information we give it.
This is why I quit -- I already have an everything-public social network that I like (Twitter), I don't need a second. People migrated to Facebook from MySpace because of privacy/clique thing, I imagine they'll go elsewhere eventually. FB will live on, but it'll be different.
People keep saying this, but the point is that Facebook got traction to begin with because it was highly private (only open to a small number of Ivy League colleges), and even later had strict privacy settings. Many people who joined never intended to sign up for a public service at all, and many still don't realize that the privacy level has shifted gradually from a kind of gated community all the way to Twitter.
If they had started the service today advertising the settings they have now, I think they would have trouble getting users.
Even if they kept the privacy settings intact, I think my point would still be true because of basic network effects.
In the beginning, only other college students were on. Now that FB has spread out to the world at large, my FB social network is pretty close to my actual social network. A friend of mine has account, but hardly uses it pointing out, "What am I going to say on Facebook? I'm friends with my mother-in-law." I'm not as restricted a user, but I still don't say much.
I think he's totally disingenuous. Yeah, we get it, you want to connect people around the world. At least be honest and say you want people to share more and more information so you can make money off of it.
He talks about being too granular with regards to privacy settings. Who is this op-ed aimed at ? Joe Average Facebook user is not going to know what he means by granular...
> At least be honest and say you want people to share more and more information so you can make money off of it.
Assuming that profit-maximizing decisions must be harmful for customers seems pretty intellectually lazy to me. You can't see any ways in which encouraging users to share more thoughts with more people could make the product more interesting to use?
> He talks about being too granular with regards to privacy settings. Who is this op-ed aimed at ?
Most Washington Post readers know what granular means.
I wasn't assuming that profit-maximizing decisions must be harmful for customers. Of course it would make the product more interesting. I just think he completely ignored what Facebook stands to gain monetarily and completely framed his argument as Facebook being altruistic.
Zuck's email to Scoble sheds some light on how they (FB) are trying to make this situation better. They want to react with actual product changes that sound like they are coming soon. (http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/23/when-do-you-throw-a-ceos-pr...)
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Hey,
We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.
We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.
I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.
I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.
-Mark
I agree... It seems pretty evident that the media attention of the past few weeks has been largely artificial. "Self promoters" are right on the mark.
You can see it in the arguments that are being made, primarily it boils down to this: Facebook has too much data on people, and that's scary.
But that's not new, FB, and all social networking sites have been collecting intimate information on users since the beginning of web2.0, the 'new' issue is supposed to be the default privacy settings. Being techies, if we are concerned about privacy, we can easily turn it off. Does it really matter that much to you that other people are sharing their information?
I'm as envious as anyone of Facebook's success. But there'll be better, more profitable battles to fight.
People are not leaving Facebook en masse right now, nor will they likely any time soon. But the Facebook vs. privacy meme has broken into the mainstream—I mean, it's literally on the cover of Time. Whether they realize it or not, a lot of people are reacting to this. They won't do anything as drastic as quitting Facebook, but they'll become more self-conscious. They'll start to post a little less and text a little more.
There won't be a Facebook exodus. Just a gradual weaning-off by users who don't even know they care about privacy, but are simply reacting viscerally to a vague mistrust of the company. Facebook won't implode, it'll just become less relevant. Like Yahoo, it'll be around for some time to come, but just as most of us haven't expected competitive search results from Yahoo for years, most of us will never really expect Facebook to safeguard any information we give it.