According to sundry articles Facebook started as a dorm room hobby of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. He stole pictures off of a Harvard web site, broke some other rules and literally said “because they are stupid” when asked why his early users trusted him with their information.
Years later, at age 26, Mark Zuckerberg dismisses those comments to being only 19 years old at the time. Fair enough, I was 19 once too. However, I have also seen rumors in various internet articles that Zuckerberg has made similar comments, recently, in what he thought were private chats.
Even if all of that weren’t true, Facebook has made a habit of changing people’s privacy settings and defaulting those settings to public. At least once a year. Without notice. Without consent. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly used the phrase “monetizing information” in reference to the content his users generate on Facebook.
Some web pundits have made the intelligent comment that Facebook’s moves were calculated and the backlash anticipated by Mark Zuckerberg. That it is all part of his plan to “monetize” his user’s lives by incrementally pushing, thereby expanding, the limits of what people will accept from an online company in terms of a company redistributing their information.
This may be true.
However, there is a point that Zuckerberg has missed, does not appreciate enough or is likely gambling that it will not become a problem. Facebook makes money by being able to tell customers that their site has X number of people going to it. People go to Facebook to socialize, that is why it is called a “social network” site. The thing is that people will not socialize unless they feel safe to do so.
Imagine you are at a party. About every ten minuets a fancy audio system beams in on one random person’s conservation and pumps up the volume of what that person is saying, broadcasting it over the speakers in the room, all over the room, out into the parking lot and maybe onto the local news.
Do you think people at that party are going to loosen up and have really good conversations? I don’t.
Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook has almost 500,000,000 users with about half of them being active.
They may be there, but that doesn’t mean they are socializing or exchanging information on the site as they would if Zuckerberg respected their boundaries. I know so many people who are keeping their accounts to keep in touch with old friends they found through the site, but these people are weighing what they say on Facebook. As they would at a party where at any moment what they say could be broadcast at high volume all over the room.
Less information to “monetize”.
MySpace used to be the social network “go to” place “everyone” went to. Now, people call it a “ghost town”.
Luckily, there are several projects underway to replace Facebook. One that sounds the most interesting to me is a project call “Diaspora”. “Diaspora” will be made from open source software nobody will own (control) and there will not be a “network” to own (control), so someone like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can’t do what he did and is doing.
The students making Diaspora appealed to the IT community for $10K for expenses. They got over $200,000. They have the support, the will and quit possibly being in the right time in the right place. The are aiming for Fall of 2010.