Dear Mark Zuckerberg
scobleizer.com
scobleizer.com
Facebook was able to avoid the scaling problems that plagued Friendster and still plague Twitter by gracefully dropping information. Your news feed may be behind some of the time and may occasionally be incomplete. Most people don't notice or care.
Facebook initially had a fairly detailed security model and fairly cautious default settings. This became a problem because it led to significant computational overhead serving requests.
Even an extremely well funded firm like Facebook realizes that if the 97% of photos that nobody cares are public require a db lookup, that's a lot of extra cycles. Due to the nature of the social graph, the problem was increasing exponentially every day and had to be dealt with.
So Zuckerberg decided to just cut away a lot of the added load in one fell swoop by changing the default setting on a lot of stuff. The servers and accountants breathed a sigh of relief.
The fallout has been remarkably small considering how significant a change this was and how crippling it could have been.
I imagine the like button announcement was intended to distract from the security changes, but instead it sort of added to the concerns.
It will blow over. Scaling problems aside I think the main advantage Twitter has over Facebook is that it doesn't try to include much of a security model which means everyone understands the security model. Nothing is really private on Facebook anyway.
Yeah, I think that's true. The historical problem for Facebook is that they got a lot of their build-up precisely by promoting themselves as having a security model. Unlike MySpace, which was a big sea of public profiles, Facebook was the place where you had to have an .edu address to sign up, and your information was kept within your circle of friends (for some kinds) or university network (for other kinds), and their marketing made a big deal of that info-stays-in-your-network aspect. So people feel that Facebook hasn't been handling privacy in keeping with how they said they were going to.
Twitter, meanwhile, never promised you much of anything: either your profile is public, or it's private, and they've stuck to that, and AFAIK haven't made any significant changes to what "private" means.
I'm so tired of hearing this. It was private once. Not everything on the internet is public. My bank information is on the internet via my bank's website and that's not public. There's a space for private social networks where I can just communicate with my sisters and wife and dad and not have to worry about what we are sharing with each other being publicly broadcasted.
Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them.
And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
They saw what twitter did with open friends lists and open posts and decided their privacy stuff was only holding them back, and heck why not ditch it? But just like Buzz they double crossed their users (what you thought was not shared is shared etc.).
This is the era of double crossing your users!
That Diaspora hailmary is a crock, wait for some talented ex-googlers or some such phenoms to really come up with an open social graph / plan / project. It will come ...
Has anyone heard something about Facebook and trust/privacy/openness from a non-geek in the recent past? Is this going mainstream or are we in a bubble?
If you piss off that same crowd, sooner or later the ripple will be felt. Depending on the order of magnitude, it could very well turn into a tidal wave as it gains speed. Makes you wonder if hockey stick inversion is possible. I think so, but I also think Facebook is smart enough to avoid it. Regardless of this privacy issue, it's still a phenomenal product.
Geeks may have driven the adoption by introducing their friends to FB, would they have the same capabilities of driving their friends away from FB?
I don't think so. They would need to give their friends an alternative which is better.
This is where Diaspora comes in. Getting geeks to set-up the hubs for them and invite all their friends. The non-geeks don't have to worry about the privacy, and server related stuff, but geeks who like that stuff actually get into it.
A lot of people haven't thought about it enough to be bothered, or it doesn't seem like the kind of transgression people have learned to abhor. the consequences might be too new to be appreciated.
I explained Instant Personalization to my dad today and he about shit himself, right before telling me he more or less didn't believe me because Facebook didn't notify him and because he didn't opt into it.
Which is why I'm sitting down with my parents and my brother tonight for a Facebook Privacy tutorial
It's much easier to make it the default and let a few people complain. The problem is, there's a limit that will eventually be reached where a lot of people complain and here we are.
This is also the sort of thing where if one leader did it (Google, Twitter, etc.), it could basically force the others to follow.
Yes, that would be nice, but Zuck can't really just come out and say "PAGE VIEWS. PAGE VIEWS AND AD IMPRESSIONS" now can he?
The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore."
This logic cracks me up. Maybe that feeling is common among Scoble readers, but I'd be surprised if my dad (who certainly far more closely resembles Facebook's 400 million users than anyone reading that post does) even knows anything changed.
Facebook is smart enough to ignore this because they know 99% of their users will be apathetic if they even find out.