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Beacon: Zuckerberg brings the mea culpa

Started by mathewi · 1 year ago

It’s like deja vu all over again, as baseball legend Yogi Berra reportedly said. Just as the Facebook news feed pushed the bounds of what users felt was appropriate in terms of privacy, and caused a backlash that eventually led to a mea culpa (Latin for “I screwed up bi ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Joe Duck

    1 year ago

    why not ask users what they would or wouldn’t be willing to tolerate

    Ummm, because that would be totally consistent with the claimed model of what a great social network will be, and totally inconsistent with maximizing profit. I'm all for community needs trumping profit, but this can only come about indirectly. Google Open Social is the best bet because *they make their profit elsewhere*. Google can sweep in with a truly user-centric social model, monetize it to a limited extent using adsense, but from their perspective leave their core cash dow - PPC search - intact. Note how Google's ad standards have relaxed quite a bit over the years, but they've been "user friendly enough" to avoid the sharp criticisms that should have been levied at Google when they slapped ads on the left side of the home page, conveniently blurring the distinction between organic and paid listings, then stopped prominently shading the advertising, allowed bogus sites to run adsense, didn't crack down early enough on the spiral of massive click fraud, etc.
    reply
  • mathewi

    1 year ago

    Joe, I don't think they are (or have to be) mutually exclusive, or
    that community needs have to "trump" profit. I think it makes sense to
    survey your customers or user base or whatever to see what they think
    of something before you roll it out and have to just as quickly roll
    it back in, that's all.
    reply
  • Rob Hyndman

    1 year ago

    "I think it makes sense to survey your customers or user base or whatever to see what they think of something before you roll it out"

    Worth noting that this is exactly what Craig and Jim do with Craigslist.
    reply
  • mathewi

    1 year ago

    That's a good point, Rob.
    reply
  • Tish Grier

    1 year ago

    Matt...this is the second time that Zuckerberg's had to issue a mea culpa for violating our privacy. Remember Sept '06 when he had to apologize (and retract) putting RSS feeds on Facebook users' profiles? Seems that Zuckerberg may be trying to find just the right way to leverage all that user-generated content on his site, and the users keep telling him to knock it off. (check my post here)
    reply
  • mathewi

    1 year ago

    I know what you mean, Trish. If this kind of thing keeps happening,
    I'm going to start to think that Mark Zuckerberg isn't sincere :-)
    reply

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