Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search.
Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
Companies are growing to the multi-billion dollar mark faster than ever. That trend will only continue as technological advances continue. What will happen in the near future as SSDs get better, larger, and cheaper? What will happen as multi-core CPUs continue their progression? As always, single newer machines become capable of replacing multiple older machines. At what point in the future does the equivalent storage, processing, and transactional volume capabilities of an entire datacenter of today fit into a single server room tomorrow? A single rack? A single 1U server? A single VPS instance?
In the not too distance future the ability to host applications like facebook that serve hundreds of millions or even billions of users will be just a click away and cheap enough to fall under the "ramen profitability" umbrella. Giant, billion user apps will be the viral videos of tomorrow. Companies will grow to enormous sizes not in a matter of years or months but in a matter of days, or hours.
What happens when your billion dollar, thousand dev. corporation has serious competition in the form of a 5 person startup?
Instead they decided to encourage the kind of spam that generates page impressions that sell ads like a media company... Lucky they're full of clever people, I guess.
It is, however, true that Facebook is unlike Google in that, while nearly everyone wants to find information, not everyone wants to share information with other people.
I won't tell my coworkers or boss the same things I tell my friends, I won't tell my friends what I tell my close friends, and my family sits on the highest tier.
Maybe facebook will get this maybe it won't, or in general maybe it is impossible on the web where information tends to be so open.
If you want privacy, don't share private information on Facebook. If you want to remain ignorant of your favorite sports team's latest scores or the most disgusting new genre of porn or how some movie you haven't seen yet ends, don't look them up on Google. The "next big thing" that Facebook is going to miss is not something people can already get by simply restricting their usage of Facebook, it'll be on a different axis entirely.
this isn't to say that i don't ever want to say something to my friends but not family, or vice-versa. more often my issues with the "audience" for my facebook posts have to do with various groups interest in the subject of the post - people i went to high school with mostly don't care about python, or some great restaurant out here across the country.
No is not. Privacy is about managing social networking, the ability to connect to those I want as I want,not someone else telling me how should I do that.
As you get more social, you get more people telling you private things.