The people I'm talking to are moms, dads, students, photographers, recent graduates, old friends from high school in rural Pennsylvania, relatives, people at th

The people I'm talking to are moms, dads, students, photographers, recent graduates, old friends from high school in rural Pennsylvania, relatives, people at the place I get my hair cut ... okay, admittedly I get my hair cut in San Francisco, and I talk to privacy advocates as well. It's not unanimous by any means, plenty of people still think it's just fine, but if they lose even 5-10% of their usage and/or engagement over the next quarter they'll have a real problem getting the IPO valuation they want. Inability to use buggy poorly-designed extremely complex software correctly is not evidence that people don't care. I'm a software engineer and security guy and deal well with complexity and even so I haven't been able to figure out how to keep my profile both visible to the people I want to and secure without devoting way more time than I have available. When I tell people that they often respond "oh thank god it's not just me". It's not just privacy; it's the whole pattern. The constantly-changing UX is a huge deal to a lot of people, and so is the general attitude of "you're the product" and Zuckerberg's non-apologies. Agreed that Google+ botched their short-term chance but it has decent usage and now has a much better first-user experience so if people react badly to Timeline, there is an alternative. In any case Google+ has clearly shown there's pent-up demand for a Facebook alternative. They'll keep investing in any case, and there are plenty of other options coming along. I talked about this back in September in "In Chaos there is Opportunity" http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=3163 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=3163