A good analysis. Traditionally I haven’t seen many in depth articles in the social space, mostly emotional reactions or people severely misunderstanding product positioning because they don’t personally use it (2 years ago this was Snap). And even if they are a user, most people have a hard time articulating the value proposition of a free social product.

well stratechery is your site lol. Ben Thompson is one of the best at doing exactly what you described.

Dont forget about his podcast Exponent where he frequently expands on his weekly stratechery articles. Good stuff.

Could FB do it? Yes. Are people stupid enough to buy it? Probably. Are they going to actually deliver what they are claiming? Hell no. Zuck will suck up any communications in his platforms and store it forever and make it available to various governments to spy on people and for corporations to exploit for profit. Nutters will continue to rile up other nutters privately but it will be more difficult to point your finger at FB.

Facebook has indeed not shown to be truthful in any way. And rhis is far beyond a small mishap where they hired the wrong person for the wrong spot and managed to deal with it for now. A beliveable transformation of their corporate culture would take a lot — starting with a resignation and a self-denunciation of Mark Zuckerberg himself.

or at the very least some kind of independent check/audit.

Yeah, it's like... How often did Facebook's press releases lie? Basically every time. Any assumed credibility is from the default assumption that people don't lie, but Facebook and Zuckerberg are far from the default - they are compulsive liars.

Clearly this was not taking the Zuckster seriously.. it was clearly sarcasm...

< Another set took Zuckerberg entirely too seriously:

I am not a stock market person but the fact that Facebook’s stock hardly budged on a day that Mark Zuckerberg said he planned to pivot the company to a totally untested new business model seems odd to me

— Casey Newton >

Evil company says it's not going to be evil any more. And they really, really mean it this time. Honest.

They didn't really say that, though. I couldn't help but notice that Zuckerberg's essay didn't even mention, let alone address, some of the largest privacy problems with Facebook at all.

That idea is what Google+ overcomplicated and underdelivered. And sadly, it's also what Friendfeed was before facebook bought and snuffed it.

> That idea is what Google+ overcomplicated and underdelivered.

People keep saying things along those lines.

Based on the number of healthy non-it-specialist communities I saw (that still stay there as long as possible) I don't think that is the explanation, except if you mean the initial launch.

My explanation is a giant PR mistake where they tried to push a botched identity consolidation at the same time and with the same name as their social network.

Ironically they later came back and fixed the identity problems and usability wise it became one of the better ones IMO. (I'm talking about keeping different groups of people separate, not protecting against TLA agencies.)

In the end we should probably be happy: they could have owned social networking in addition to mail and search.

The reason that I never used Google+ was that, like Hangouts, I could never get it to work acceptably well on a technical level.

Facebook and Google will continue to be privacy nightmares unless their business models change fundamentally.

tl;dr: Facebook plans to focus more on "privacy" in its marketing. Nothing changes about the data collection from a technical/product point of view. Question is whether people will believe that Facebook now is a privacy-focused company or not.