@Strategyist

★ Facebook’s evolution: brilliant but borderline

Some more thoughts on the recent Facebook moves, triggered by a good question on Google Buzz by Chris Myles.

The F8 announcements are a brilliant move, strategically.

Facebook is fully leveraging its core assets (social graph, personal characteristics, attention data) to expand into new services (identity, personalization) which so far were hardly accessible to mainstream users. I have very little doubt that this will succeed, as there is demand for it (initially from websites who will love this access to profiles for analytics and providing socially relevant data, and then for users who will start to enjoy the personalization of content).

But where I feel a bit less comfortable is on how Facebook is getting there.

In the past two years, Facebook has been dramatically altering the nature of its service (from private to public, with many steps in between) without (IMHO) properly informing its users (using “opt-out by default”, which means 99% of users didn’t notice/care enough to look into it) and trying to force this change upon those who do notice through peer pressure (which keeps us from leaving: after all, Facebook is a great communication tool where we share stuff with friends).

It’s perfectly OK to be an agent of change — all successful startups are, in a way — but it’s not OK to force such change upon anyone without properly informing them that you are fundamentally changing your service to something different from what they expect you to do. Especially when the changes are about the user’s privacy.

For me, Facebook has crossed a line here (although it had already gone halfway in December), and shown that it wouldn’t let us control who accesses our data anymore. This is not something to be taken lightly. We’ll see what comes out of this (hopefully more good than bad), but I can’t wait to see some open alternatives putting me back in control of my identity and social graph. That may not be something most users want, but I’d like the option to be there, in case Facebook goes further down this slope…

29. April 2010 by Jean Friesewinkel
Categories: Privacy | Tags: facebook, Privacy | 8 comments

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