
Dear Mark Zuckerberg - aditya
http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/13/dear-mark-zuckerberg/
======
grandalf
I think the big picture view of this is fairly different from Scoble's take:

Facebook was able to avoid the scaling problems that plagued Friendster and
still plague Twitter by gracefully dropping information. Your news feed may be
behind some of the time and may occasionally be incomplete. Most people don't
notice or care.

Facebook initially had a fairly detailed security model and fairly cautious
default settings. This became a problem because it led to significant
computational overhead serving requests.

Even an extremely well funded firm like Facebook realizes that if the 97% of
photos that nobody cares are public require a db lookup, that's a lot of extra
cycles. Due to the nature of the social graph, the problem was increasing
exponentially every day and had to be dealt with.

So Zuckerberg decided to just cut away a lot of the added load in one fell
swoop by changing the default setting on a lot of stuff. The servers and
accountants breathed a sigh of relief.

The fallout has been remarkably small considering how significant a change
this was and how crippling it could have been.

I imagine the like button announcement was intended to distract from the
security changes, but instead it sort of added to the concerns.

It will blow over. Scaling problems aside I think the main advantage Twitter
has over Facebook is that it doesn't try to include much of a security model
which means everyone understands the security model. Nothing is really private
on Facebook anyway.

~~~
apphacker
> Nothing is really private on Facebook anyway.

I'm so tired of hearing this. It was private once. Not everything on the
internet is public. My bank information is on the internet via my bank's
website and that's not public. There's a space for private social networks
where I can just communicate with my sisters and wife and dad and not have to
worry about what we are sharing with each other being publicly broadcasted.

~~~
glhaynes
If you want to do that, can't you just send a message (rather than a wall
post) to your sisters, wife, and/or dad?

~~~
pak
Can't wait for the day when even messages get exposed bit by bit to APIs and
third parties. It will get slipped in as a default one day, and before you
know it...

------
hans
The fact is fB wants everyone to share everything: that's tons more open
attention data they can mine for spam. This is why they NeVeR offer fine
grained controls on sharing: its a business play.

They saw what twitter did with open friends lists and open posts and decided
their privacy stuff was only holding them back, and heck why not ditch it? But
just like Buzz they double crossed their users (what you thought was not
shared is shared etc.).

This is the era of double crossing your users!

That Diaspora hailmary is a crock, wait for some talented ex-googlers or some
such phenoms to really come up with an open social graph / plan / project. It
will come ...

~~~
hans
In a way it shows they may not even understand their branding, b/c twitter is
a totally different beast than fB, fB should strive to be personal and
trustworthy not jacking your shxt.

------
MikeCapone
I wonder if this 'disturbance in the force' with regard to facebook is being
felt only by us geeks or if regular people are starting to feel it too.

Has anyone heard something about Facebook and trust/privacy/openness from a
non-geek in the recent past? Is this going mainstream or are we in a bubble?

~~~
pxlpshr
If you haven't already noticed, early-adopting geeks drive adoption to the
masses. They are an important part of the vetting process.

If you piss off that same crowd, sooner or later the ripple will be felt.
Depending on the order of magnitude, it could very well turn into a tidal wave
as it gains speed. Makes you wonder if hockey stick inversion is possible. I
think so, but I also think Facebook is smart enough to avoid it. Regardless of
this privacy issue, it's still a phenomenal product.

~~~
pedalpete
I think the question that needs asking is if the geeks would drive the exodus
of non-geeks.

Geeks may have driven the adoption by introducing their friends to FB, would
they have the same capabilities of driving their friends away from FB?

I don't think so. They would need to give their friends an alternative which
is better.

This is where Diaspora comes in. Getting geeks to set-up the hubs for them and
invite all their friends. The non-geeks don't have to worry about the privacy,
and server related stuff, but geeks who like that stuff actually get into it.

~~~
c1sc0
Can geeks drive a product exodus? Yes, but making people give up a bad habit
is a lot more difficult than convincing them to adopt the next cool tech. Case
in point: Windows.

~~~
pxlpshr
bingo. Facebook is a habit and becoming the start page for millions of people.

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biggitybones
Implementing these suggestions would limit the use of the information and thus
limit the spread. Zuckerberg doesn't want people to make the choice on whether
to share their data because he knows that most will decline, which limits the
amount of data that can be shared with the world (and advertisers/3rd party
apps).

It's much easier to make it the default and let a few people complain. The
problem is, there's a limit that will eventually be reached where a _lot_ of
people complain and here we are.

------
riffer
The new idea that caught my eye here: Facebook could hire a firm to audit
their privacy processes. They wouldn't have to give up any flexibility in
their privacy policy updating practices, the review could just be of their
processes, and it would provide some reassurance.

This is also the sort of thing where if one leader did it (Google, Twitter,
etc.), it could basically force the others to follow.

~~~
jacquesm
When hell freezes over I'll expect that to be top of the list. The _last_
thing these companies want is some nosy third party telling the public at
large what data they hold on you and what they do with it.

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malloreon
"Tell people why you're being more open."

Yes, that would be nice, but Zuck can't really just come out and say "PAGE
VIEWS. PAGE VIEWS AND AD IMPRESSIONS" now can he?

~~~
code_duck
Page views and ad impressions, sure. But what about licensing all of the data
to others? Sure that must be an attractive source of revenue, and if it's
'private' it's harder to do.

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mattmaroon
"The ones you can’t ignore?

The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore."

This logic cracks me up. Maybe that feeling is common among Scoble readers,
but I'd be surprised if my dad (who certainly far more closely resembles
Facebook's 400 million users than anyone reading that post does) even knows
anything changed.

Facebook is smart enough to ignore this because they know 99% of their users
will be apathetic if they even find out.

------
lolindian
How do you trust a name like zuckerberg? It's like a cross between sucker and
iceberg, esp if you say it while drunk.

