The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default

In my little corner of FB people are already reporting seeing things that they never did before (e.g. status updates and photos from cow-orkers). If FB screw this up there will be a huge backlash.

It's exasperating to see Facebook flailing about like this. A corner of the Internet where there is no anonymity and you only get what you opt into all my intuition says could be an incredibly valuable thing. FB essentially solved the spam problem for example (app invites notwithstanding) - something not even Gmail has managed. They can do things with photos Flickr can only dream of, since Flickr can't assume that the people in the photos will be members. Same with events. They could be sewing up all sorts of commercial arrangements here. If I create a LAN party event FB should be handling ordering pizza through Papa John's website (and taking a cut). If I create a group trip event FB should be partnering with travel companies, cinemas, everything.

Instead they're dumbing everything down to become what exactly, a lamer Twitter than Twitter itself?

Normally I'd agree with you. In Facebook's case, I'll make the argument that Facebook's only trying to do a single thing, but that single thing is so ambitious that they're justified in taking this move.

The goal of Facebook is to let people make a profile of themselves online and keep in touch with friends. That's a widespread, two-pronged goal. Way back before the last two redesigns, Facebook focused a lot on the profile part of the equation. That's when they had the two-column approach with no theming whatsoever. Then they added apps and profiles became overspammed, and they made the slow switch over to the feed system. In the last few months, they've been adding public profile features, without sacrificing their original intent whatsoever. That's impressive. It means that my family can maintain its closed Facebook connections, but my public-minded friends can go public and not have to worry about managing other web sites. Furthermore, the options are granular, meaning you can make parts of you public and keep other parts private. I refuse to friend family members, but I can give them public photo links so they can still be involved in my goings-on. It's a terrific solution.

I have to wonder if all of the "Facebook=Twitter" critics use Facebook at all, because it's the most deluded thing I've heard. People are fucking mental if they think Facebook's trying to supplant Twitter. It's taking some pages out of their book, absolutely, but if you can mimic a site without removing any functionality then you're doing something good. Now, my Facebook feed isn't a bunch of 140-character updates. People post links and photos and videos and they all show up. Any post can spark a conversation. Whereas on Twitter I post something into a void, on Facebook friends comment on my status updates. Conversations begin. Furthermore, because Facebook treats a user's wall like a continuous stream, if I post something to a friend's wall, all our friends see it. I've actually had friends meet up and become friends through talking on a post on my wall, which is one of those things where you can't help but think "Wow, this is really cool".

Facebook won't beat Twitter where Twitter reigns supreme. But they'll add Twitter-like features and make their users happier, and less likely to switch over to using other services.

From the article:

We have identified this bug and closed the loophole. We don’t have any evidence to suggest that it was ever exploited for malicious purposes.

Yeah, it's not like Facebook already solved the problem. It's fun thinking of them as utter incompetents who don't spend years executing very subtle redesigns without alienating their hundred million users, because they haven't been radically changing the site since it first launched.