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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

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.

_delirium 17y ago
> 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. Yeah, I think that's true. The historical problem for Facebook is that they got a lot of their build-up precisely by promoting themselves as having a security model. Unlike MySpace, which was a big sea of public profiles, Facebook was the place where you had to have an .edu address to sign up, and your information was kept within your circle of friends (for some kinds) or university network (for other kinds), and their marketing made a big deal of that info-stays-in-your-network aspect. So people feel that Facebook hasn't been handling privacy in keeping with how they said they were going to. Twitter, meanwhile, never promised you much of anything: either your profile is public, or it's private, and they've stuck to that, and AFAIK haven't made any significant changes to what "private" means.
apphacker 17y ago
> 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.
- grandalf 17y ago
  Well, your sisters or wife or dad could repost something you posted and then it's only as secure as their settings. Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them. And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
- glhaynes 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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...
xelipe 17y ago
That is a good breakdown of Scoble's open letter, it was more of a love letter than a dear john letter. As mentioned, the gist of the letter is that, according to Scoble, the PR issue will blow over if Mark Zuckerberg invites Scoble over to his house.

_delirium 17y ago

> 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. Yeah, I think that's true. The historical problem for Facebook is that they got a lot of their build-up precisely by promoting themselves as having a security model. Unlike MySpace, which was a big sea of public profiles, Facebook was the place where you had to have an .edu address to sign up, and your information was kept within your circle of friends (for some kinds) or university network (for other kinds), and their marketing made a big deal of that info-stays-in-your-network aspect. So people feel that Facebook hasn't been handling privacy in keeping with how they said they were going to. Twitter, meanwhile, never promised you much of anything: either your profile is public, or it's private, and they've stuck to that, and AFAIK haven't made any significant changes to what "private" means.

apphacker 17y ago

> 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.

grandalf 17y ago
Well, your sisters or wife or dad could repost something you posted and then it's only as secure as their settings. Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them. And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
glhaynes 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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...

xelipe 17y ago

That is a good breakdown of Scoble's open letter, it was more of a love letter than a dear john letter. As mentioned, the gist of the letter is that, according to Scoble, the PR issue will blow over if Mark Zuckerberg invites Scoble over to his house.