Facebook gets a memo from the real owners

Posted on September 12, 2006
Filed Under Social Media |

Welcome to a world in which all of the content and value that is in your service is created by the people who use it, not you… and they will let you know it when they feel slighted. In many ways this is no different than any protest against a change in a favorite product (e.g. New Coke) but what is different is in a networked economy the velocity is much faster and intense. The other thing that is different, as I opened with, is that without all those users you just pissed off your fancy service isn’t nearly as compelling so in effect they become owners of the service in some sense.

There is another part of me that looks at Facebook and it’s popularity on college campuses and says “what? you didn’t think people were looking at your private information?”. Seriously, there is a small amount of “dumb ass factor” among college students who think that putting their private information in a public service means it’s still private. I’ve talked to recent college grads that were being recruited by companies I am involved with and they express shock and dismay at the idea that potential employers are actually interested in looking at their Facebook profiles… first shock, then dismay, then panic.

The revolt you didn’t hear about: By 2:15 p.m. last Tuesday, the day of the new plan, that group had grown to more than 100,000 members. By Friday, it had reached 700,000 and was spamming Zuckerberg’s e-mail address with a petition of complaint. College newspapers began to weigh in. A columnist at the Columbia Daily Spectator suggested, mostly tongue in cheek, that “the Facebook news feed is our generation’s Vietnam.”

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