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It's probably too late. Not to regain user's trust, it doesn't appear most users actually care about Facebook's privacy issues. No, I think it's too late to a

by whyenot 16y ago

It's probably too late. Not to regain user's trust, it doesn't appear most users actually care about Facebook's privacy issues. No, I think it's too late to avoid the creation and eventual passage of some "protect the children" laws that at least a few politicians are almost certainly working on right now.

Silhouette 16y ago
If I were an exec at Facebook, I wouldn't worry about laws, I'd worry about a small project in some CompSci student's garage that is going to turn into an open, fully encrypted, freely available, direct competitor within the next year. One potential rival service has been all over the geek news sites for the past day or two after raising a significant level of funding via donations very quickly. No doubt there are dozens more experiments out there that might turn out to be the next big social network instead...
- acgourley 16y ago
  It's an oversimplification to see facebook as one product that can be replaced by another product. Facebook as it is now fulfills a lot of roles, some roles are going to see competition, some roles like facebook connect are here to stay.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    I'm sure Facebook would like to be some sort of all-emcompassing platform, but its main value has always been the "self-updating address book", which is useful if and only if almost everyone you know is on there. All the other stuff, the messaging and photo sharing and toy apps and personal information pages and so on, can already be done elsewhere as well or better than Facebook does it, except for the automatic links to friends and the security/networking that come with that. If Facebook either loses a significant number of people in someone's friendship group to a rival system or loses the privacy/networking effects by making almost everything public, its value is going to drop very quickly for a lot of users and a vicious circle of people leaving is likely to follow.

by whyenot 16y ago

Silhouette 16y ago

If I were an exec at Facebook, I wouldn't worry about laws, I'd worry about a small project in some CompSci student's garage that is going to turn into an open, fully encrypted, freely available, direct competitor within the next year. One potential rival service has been all over the geek news sites for the past day or two after raising a significant level of funding via donations very quickly. No doubt there are dozens more experiments out there that might turn out to be the next big social network instead...

acgourley 16y ago
It's an oversimplification to see facebook as one product that can be replaced by another product. Facebook as it is now fulfills a lot of roles, some roles are going to see competition, some roles like facebook connect are here to stay.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  I'm sure Facebook would like to be some sort of all-emcompassing platform, but its main value has always been the "self-updating address book", which is useful if and only if almost everyone you know is on there. All the other stuff, the messaging and photo sharing and toy apps and personal information pages and so on, can already be done elsewhere as well or better than Facebook does it, except for the automatic links to friends and the security/networking that come with that. If Facebook either loses a significant number of people in someone's friendship group to a rival system or loses the privacy/networking effects by making almost everything public, its value is going to drop very quickly for a lot of users and a vicious circle of people leaving is likely to follow.