Comments on: Facebook’s ‘Evil Empire” One Year Later

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:14:13 +0000

I don’t know, Kel, recognizing the privacy thing a year in advance is pretty prescient.

I’ll be interested to see who the privacy alarmists are and what their motivation is. I suspect new digital immigrants have different fears than digital old-timers.

By: ks

ks — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:37:02 +0000

Interesting read and I agree with pretty much all of it — except for the part where you credit me with “fortune telling.”

The thing to keep in mind is that FB’s core user model is intended to appeal to the very folks who are most likely to become alarmists at the first sign of change. Any mention of FB’s privacy settings will cognitively bind to that part of the brain that idiopathically fears digital media in general.

The reality is that FB is less interested in releasing “private” user information than it is about increasing traffic share. A good analysis came out today: http://bit.ly/cdG6TJ

By: Twitter Trackbacks for think blog » Facebook’s ‘Evil Empire” One Year Later [thinkbrownstone.com] on Topsy.com

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:55:52 +0000

[...] think blog » Facebook’s ‘Evil Empire” One Year Later http://www.thinkbrownstone.com/blog/?p=566 – view page – cached It has been nearly a year since I penned my original rant about Doomsdayers and Nay-sayers terrified about Facebook wanting to own their content. As many predicted, FB changed their entire business model and made a fortune selling all of those riveting lunch updates and pictures of sleeping cats. [...]

By: phil

phil — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:29:20 +0000

I hear you on the default settings issue, certainly they could have handled that better, but I do stand by the “alarmist” label. I’m not talking about ALL of the griping about FB – it DOES take the squeaky wheels to institute change… The alarmists are the ones with the status updates making it sound like FB was about to raid your bank accounts, move into your home, read your mail and erase your DVRs, then begging you to “post this to your status.”

The fact of the matter is that what they were publishing to public search engines is exactly what the 349,999,950 FB members who are not my friend could see.

Sneaky is bad… credit card companies do it when they update your agreement with notices printed in 8-pt font. FB should aspire to be better than that!

By: jeff

jeff — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:32:25 +0000

Good points, as always. Don’t agree with your “alarmist” term though. “Staunch and Vigilant Protectors of All That is Good with Facebook” makes more sense to me. There are very few social media apps I really enjoy and FB is one of them (sue me, I like baby photos, beer talk and posts by weird Russian guys), so when they hatch a new plan that changes my expectations, I’ll (and many) will speak up. The Squeaky wheel, my brother, … get ignored by FB.

Like you said, it wasn’t Zuck’s new “info Sharing” game plan that bothered me so much, it was the simply “the fact that the default settings made more of your information public than the average user would like.”

That was a bit sneaky. Tsk Tsk.

Also, there’s already enough crap clogging up the Google search pipes (Twitter Updates), adding the Facebook info will not be a much value.