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Lots of Unhappy Faces at Facebook
In case anyone had any doubts about the power of the social web, the controversy about Facebook's plan to send RSS updates of members' updates should put it to rest. Here are some initial issues the incident raises....
290,000 members joining a protest group demanding a change of this policy...a promised boycott of Facebook next week...and no Cesar Chavez leading it. This is truly a grass roots reaction. (For those of you too young to remember Cesar Chavez and the Grape Boycott of the '60's and '70's, check out Wikipedia.)
This controversy will likely continue to grow and evolve over the next few days and I'll update my thoughts about it. But here are some initial thoughts and questions that I hope to explore more over the coming days.
- Is this about poor communications on Facebook's part or the boundaries of privacy? From my read, the RSS feeds only go to a small circle of friends, the people who most likely come to the friend's site on a regular basis anyway. Mark explains this pretty clearly in his post. Is RSS so cutting edge that even these presumably sophisticated users don't fully understand it? Or did this cross some line which even these people who live their lives very publicly don't want to cross?
- What was Facebook's product development process? Did they get any user input before hand? Or are they developing these features in an engineering silo because they are "cool" as Ruchi Sangvhi says in her blog post announcing them.
- And why didn't Facebook have a blog long ago? They just started their blog on August 22; thank goodness they did so they have a platform to respond to the uproar. Mark Zuckerberg did a nice job on jumping on it with his Tuesday post. But nothing since. I think the members would like to know what his thinking is two days later, even if it is just to stay "we understand concern is growing and we're looking at some options." But they probably could have avoided this whole issue if their blog had been active during the development process and they pinged their members for feedback.
- Why didn't Facebook learn from eBay's mistakes? Several years ago, eBay had similar user backlash to changes in policies and fees. eBay has since developed a philosophy that while they own the platform, the community should be empowered in large part to govern itself.
Posted by Jim Nail on September 7, 2006 at 12:25 PM | Email this post
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I think I can shed some light on at least your first bullet point. The issue is a combination of the two, a lack of communication and a concern over privacy, but at its core is about a fundamental disconnect between what how Facebook management and non-Facebook users (for example, much of the tech blogger corps) believe Facebook "should" be used, and how students actually use the service.
In brief, what the current "news feeds" product fails to do is differentiate between "friends" and "acquaintances". Facebook has, for a couple years now, been used as a sort of "living yearbook" (to use a phrase I saw somewhere else, and I apologize that I can't attribute it properly). Many people have on their Facebook list, in addition to their actual "friends", people they went to high school with, people they went to summer camp with, people they were in some clubs with, and all sorts of other people who they've met, and they know, but wouldn't want privy to every detail of their lives. Facebook Inc. seems to think that people only use Facebook to communicate with their couple dozen or so "true friends", and if that were the case then the News Feeds issue would be much ado about nothing. But that's simply not the way the system is used, and I think a lot of people are up in arms over this basic failure to recognize what users want.
Of course, the lack of communication certainly isn't helping. You point out that Facebook has a blog, which is true, but you should also know that the blog originally allowed comments. Within hours of the News Feeds feature going live (at about 4am on Tuesday), there were hundreds of comments on the announcement post, nearly all of them negative. Facebook's response was to erase all the comments and disable the commenting feature. What's coming across is an attitude that "Facebook knows best" (if you read Zuckerberg's blog post in this light, it highlights a lot of the problems with this feature), and that any users who are complaining simply aren't using the service "correctly". This is turning off a lot of people, and it's poor business practice to boot; if you have a service, and a huge proportion of your users aren't using in the way you intended, you need to either change your expectations or realize that you're going to lose a lot of your userbase. Facebook Inc. hasn't made this decision yet, but every public statement they've made seems to be pointing toward the latter. It's unfortunate, but it's the path they've chosen.
Posted by: Jay | Sep 7, 2006 12:38:57 PM
Thanks Jay. You seem to confirm my point that they are in their "silo" or "ivory tower" doing what they think is cool. They're talking the talk of being a social tool but not walking the walk. And I like you're point that if customers are doing something with your product that you didn't expect, you need to change not the customer. Wasn't it the great merchant Marshall Field who coined the phrase "The customer is always right"? Over a hundred years later, so many companies still haven't learned this basic lesson.
Posted by: Jim Nail | Sep 7, 2006 1:01:30 PM
This isn't to say, by the way, that there aren't real privacy concerns behind some of the criticism. Although Facebook is saying that "everything on the News Feed was available publicly before", this statement misses the fact that not only is there significant value added in aggregation, but that "available" is different than "broadcast".
Even more disconcerting from a privacy perspective, though, is the fact that the News Feeds not only note additions to your profile, but also highlights information that was removed. It used to be that if you put something up, and later felt it was in your interests to take it down (e.g., listing "getting high" as one of your interests), then that information was gone without a trace. But now, taking down that information would result in a News Feed item that would say something along the lines of, "Jim Nail has removed 'getting high' as one of his interests". I think that a lot of people haven't realized this yet, but it strikes me as a serious, serious issue.
Posted by: Jay | Sep 7, 2006 1:18:51 PM
