Making Control Simple
blog.facebook.com
blog.facebook.com
I don't like the long preamble trying to justify themselves, but now that I can turn off Facebook Platform entirely, it's a small price to pay.
give people a compelling reason to use a product (in this case to turn it on), or you have no product--period.
You might disagree with the defaults they've chosen, but having everything "off" by default isn't a great world.
Having everything by default is the very reason people chose to use this application in the first place. That's the product people bought into--with their data and attention--and now that product is getting changed, in many cases, without their knowledge and/or without their understanding of what's at stake.
It's really scammy. Once it pops up, you're trapped. Click on the facebook logo, and it doesn't take you home. There is no way out unless you either agree, or manually go back to facebook.com yourself.
What are they thinking doing crap like that...
Totally obnoxious.
Secondly, I just went and checked out the instant personalization feature, which I explicitly opted-out of when it launched, only to find the feature re-enabled.
Things have changed, but nothing changed at all.
By tricking users into making more information public they get more hits and get more opportunities to 'share' your data with 3rd parties.
What is your explanation for why facebook removed the ability to make your profile picture private to non-friends?
Basically, if your profile picture were private, it would be hard for someone (who is your friend/acquaintance in real life) who isn't friends with you (on Facebook) already to find you on the site.
That is very different from this: "The only way they can do it is by selling users data one way or another.". People often claim that Facebook wants to "sell" your data to advertisers, and I'm simply saying that claim is wrong.
(I've never been secretive about the fact that I worked at Facebook, it's on my profile. )
Now, you can argue that making private information public to generate revenues is not selling, however, IMO, it is, given the fact that they started out as a completely private social network.
"If you simply want to turn on instant personalization, we've also made that easier."
If "personalization" is such a great feature, people will turn it on. "opt in" by default, please!
I see absolutely no changes here, except that privacy settings are now tabbed, and that instead of a dropdown, you now have radio buttons. Wow, now this is simpler! /sarcasm
BTW, are you a facebook employee? I went through your comments and a good 90% (no hyperbole this time) are comments related to Facebook posts, and some looked pro-facebook. Nothing wrong, of course, just curious.
Marks says at http://www.businessinsider.com/live-facebook-rolls-out-new-p... :
On quitting the site: "We've seen no meaningful change on the stats on any of that stuff."
It makes me wonder if Facebook had a bad couple of days of people deleting their accounts and Mark Zuckerberg thought "Right, we've got 7 days to fix this and get them logging in again, let's get to it!"
* I could have the precise timeframe wrong
http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
Who's right?
Wrong. If you deactivate your account, you can bring it back. If you request it to be deleted, you have 14 days to cancel that request (by simply logging in) before it's deleted. Once it's deleted, that's the end -- you can't bring it back.
(edited to make clear which part of your comment is wrong)
It looks like you will be asked to confirm deletion if you log in during the waiting period. Simply logging back in will not cancel the deletion request.
"Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, your account will be reactivated and you will have the option to cancel your request."
Now, I can see ISPs setting up social network nodes for their users, I just wonder if there won't be some similar pain if/when one changes provider.
Not true for all the contacts in your fb profile.
"III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us ...
7. You must not use user data you receive from us or collect through running an ad, including information you derive from your targeting criteria, for any purpose off of Facebook, without user consent." [1]
I suspect that means you need consent from every user whose information you collected (your own list of contacts is made up of other peoples' basic information).
It's generally within FB's terms of service to store Facebook ids, but unless you're a larger company like Yahoo, I don't think you're allowed to do much else other than use the data for your app.
It's not much, but it's enough to help create someone's account on your competing social network. Whether you'd be able to store/export their posts/other people's comments is a different question - it depends on the definition of application, but FriendFeed seemed to be able to do it, so why can't someone else?
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/08/friendfeed-accepts-facebo...
You might be able to take a user's data to establish their profile, they consented by using your application after all. But I don't think you can export their friend list and use it to invite them to your new social network.
Either way, I think Facebook could find something in their ToS to shut you down if they feel like you're stealing their users away. There was a recent article about a tool from Power Ventures that allowed you to login to multiple social networks and aggregate the messages, friends lists and what not. Facebook seemed to claim it was a violation of the ToS because they were accessing account data using "automated means."
Most users migrating their emails to another provider can do it through a desktop email client. At most it might require learning how to download an mbox file or some such. Pretty hard stuff for an average user, but not impossible.
Try telling a user that they'd have to program their own app on a proprietary third-party API and host it on their own servers and go through some sort of vetting process just to get a backup of their emails and... well I hope you can see where I am going.
Some people are totally comfortable with the risk, but frankly I think it would be good for everybody that the "social networking infrastructure" is not owned by one company. Then... like email, ISPs, IM, mobile phone providers... everyone would have a choice and companies could compete for their customers.
The same thing goes for Diaspora. It's going to take a miracle to make the majority of Facebook users jump over to a social network that cannot be used for free.
What do you have with diaspora? Nothing! Other than some kids notion of what an open social network might look like. No code, no prior reputation, you don't even know if they can make a tic-tac-toe. You know nothing.
So please don't compare Diaspora, something that doesn't exist in any form, to something that does (facebook) or something that people are working on (fusion).
It's certainly possible they'll build a solid product, but for something of this magnitude, and with the amount of audacity they have within their ranks to accomplish something this monumental (especially coming close on $200,00), they haven't particularly sold their case to the technical crowd that what they're going to build wont turn into vaporware.
More pointedly, they haven't sold their case that diaspora will even be worth checking out.