"We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends."
Shame, that privacy and intimacy (plus the voyeurism that ensued) is what made FB so popular in the first place.
And from my [limited, anecdotal] experience, the people who use Facebook the most are talking with their grandmas and cousins, and have little to gain from mass public exposure. (I'd really like to have numbers about this to back up my observation.)
The good thing about Facebook is that as quick as they are to fuck up, they're even quicker at recognizing when users are pissed off and fixing themselves. They're even smart enough to differentiate between "Users don't like change" and "We really did an oopsie"; they've uncannily predicted which of their controversial changes would become more popular with time.
I don't know if this one'll make them change, though. Most people don't really want privacy anymore. My kneejerk, unthoughtout bet would be on their making it easy upon registration to decide on a blanket privacy policy. Make it easy for people to clamp up again but maintain the public status quo. Everybody's happy.
I agree on that one. Even though large groups of users scream about and sign petitions regarding Facebook's changing privacy policies, I'm convinced most users don't really care about how public their wall-to-wall conversations, photos, etc. get. I'd argue that if 100, 200, or 300 'friends' can see what you're posting on Facebook, it might as well be completely public. Facebook isn't making friending obsolete, users are.
Shame, that privacy and intimacy (plus the voyeurism that ensued) is what made FB so popular in the first place.
And from my [limited, anecdotal] experience, the people who use Facebook the most are talking with their grandmas and cousins, and have little to gain from mass public exposure. (I'd really like to have numbers about this to back up my observation.)