My dad, who has no Internet, and watches mainstream TV, said to me the other day, "Boy it sounds like Apple really screwed up with the iPhone 4, eh?" I said, oh, yeah, screwed up Real Good. Name two competitors to the iPhone 4. At that instant, my dad attained enlightenment.
I think the thing is that Facebook is learning from this. If there was actually a viable competitor at the time, the whole hype surrounding the incident might be enough to push and bootstrap enough users onto its competitor. We saw this to a limited extent with Diaspora, but given that there wasn't anything to actually sign up for, its hype has mostly fizzled by now.
Right now, Facebook is practically the only game in town, they don't have to worry about these mass migrations. But if Google manages comes up with an even comparably good clone of Facebook, it may become an issue.
Even if Google cloned Facebook line-for-line I'm not sure how would it gain any traction. I have such an incredible amount of metadata locked inside Facebook that it's going to take a LOT to get me to change to anything new. And why -- just so Sergey can own my data instead of Zuck?
And that's the point, really -- don't let your metadata get locked into one service! We should have been supporting exchange standards for this stuff years ago.
That's the downfall of the Web age of the Internet; we (the public) reverted to a client-server attitude rather than a network of equal peers.
My Facebook account is still active, but there's nothing there but an email address and a picture now. I think that's a fair compromise for the time being.
"Nobody else cares" because for a lot of people it is easier not to care about annoying issues like security & privacy. Never attribute to ignorance what can easily be attributed to carelessness.
I think they made some minute changes possibly? For some reason I remember going to cnn.com and seeing info about my friends right on the front page. Now you have to login.
Also, I think the takeaway is that FB should just figure out a better way of communicating privacy related features to the userbase, not just the developers. They need to sell these features to the userbase. Twitter has no privacy, and no one cares because thats how they promote the service. FB could launch 'FB everywhere' and still let it be opt out. Its when you sneak the features in the backdoor at some developer conference that joe blow gets pissed.
This is hardly news. As I recall, anytime Facebook does anything, people threaten to leave en masse. And guess what? It never happens.
I can never get over the irony of this type of meta-journalism. It's not like TechCrunch hasn't been actively participating in covering the Facebook privacy "debacle".
It's not really irony, we just have different opinions. I've been covering the issues for a long time and disagree with MG here (I'll probably post a response to him in a few days).
I didn't quit, but I stopped reading the Facebook feed. That was a major step for me, as I was somewhat north of Facebook's average of 55 minutes per user per day on the site. This has really helped cut that down to < 10.
I stopped reading the feed too. People were never going to leave facebook in droves. But the controversies eventually become exhausting to the point where it's difficult to justify regular visitations, which is a hit to facebook.
Social networking have been deprecated in the past. It happened to myspace, and friendfeed before it.
I remember the proponents of myspace arguing it couldn't lose momentum when it was at its peak, but it surely did. Perhaps predicting these things is a bit of a black swan event.
I maintain an account there purely as an identity placeholder, with an explanation of such in my description (with all other privacy choices set to "only me"). I'm not adding new friends (but I haven't mass de-friended anyone, to ensure the account actually serves as a credible placeholder), and I'm not interacting with the site at all except via incognito mode in Chrome when someone sends me something that requires a Facebook login.
I've commented this in another thread: I had this idea a while ago for real events on campuses, themed "Quit Facebook Party". People would get together and delete their accounts, the process being projected on the wall for others to see. With the social validation people would find it easier to make the step and realize how few consequences it has, apart from freeing up a lot of time.
Sure, they'd do it. But when 85% of your friend network wasn't at this party, and they start complaining about you not being on, and you stop getting invited to things (because people assume their FB friends list really is their entire friend base), would you really have the willpower to stay off?
Not you personally, really I should phrase that, "what percentage would stay off"? The social pressure has lifted, suddenly it doesn't seem worth the trouble. It and certainly doesn't seem worth the meta-trouble of a continued checkup process to make sure nobody defects.
I think the point of this article is that people don't care as much as they think they should. They just try to convince themselves they do. Not pretty (kind of scary), but a fact we'll have to come to terms with.
"Little girl brutally murdered after FB's privacy controls reveal her to a crazy stalker"
People just don't respond to rational argument, data, and talk the way they do to fear. Obviously for the little girl's sake I hope this never happens, but honestly I don't see Facebook going down any other way anytime soon.
It's not clear what drives the stories/cultural view, though 146's comment about having a viable alternative seems to be important in actually causing people to quit a service.
This article isn't about quitting Facebook. The key quote from the OP:
> Facebook is only evil as long as saying Facebook is evil is driving traffic, is my takeaway from this.
It's about what happens to news in a lucrative, competitive environment. The reason we haven't had to use the term "yellow journalism" since the turn of the last century is because the market for news was so stagnant.
Now there's a new, robust market, and we're seeing a lot of the same tactics all over again.
I guess not RTFA and commenting on the title alone isn't isolated to Slashdot. er... I actually knew that but this thread shows it splendourly (is that a word?).
Anyway, the actual meat of the article, although a known issue for those who have any interest in the media business, would give HNers an opportunity for some shots at Techcrunch (pottle/kettle).
The internet isn't much different than television on this regard. There's a popular, hot topic one week that vanishes on the other. The blond girl that has gone missing happens every couple years. The media reports the case extensively, then another shiny topic comes, and it's dropped. Of course, boys/girls gone missing/kidnapped happens way more frequently than every two years, but sometimes through some crazy conjunction of factors, one is disproportionally reported.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 72.5 ms ] threadIt's a very popular choice.
Nobody else cares.
Right now, Facebook is practically the only game in town, they don't have to worry about these mass migrations. But if Google manages comes up with an even comparably good clone of Facebook, it may become an issue.
That's the downfall of the Web age of the Internet; we (the public) reverted to a client-server attitude rather than a network of equal peers.
My Facebook account is still active, but there's nothing there but an email address and a picture now. I think that's a fair compromise for the time being.
I can never get over the irony of this type of meta-journalism. It's not like TechCrunch hasn't been actively participating in covering the Facebook privacy "debacle".
Social networking have been deprecated in the past. It happened to myspace, and friendfeed before it.
I remember the proponents of myspace arguing it couldn't lose momentum when it was at its peak, but it surely did. Perhaps predicting these things is a bit of a black swan event.
I think you meant Friendster.
I'm much happier as a result.
Not you personally, really I should phrase that, "what percentage would stay off"? The social pressure has lifted, suddenly it doesn't seem worth the trouble. It and certainly doesn't seem worth the meta-trouble of a continued checkup process to make sure nobody defects.
I think the point of this article is that people don't care as much as they think they should. They just try to convince themselves they do. Not pretty (kind of scary), but a fact we'll have to come to terms with.
"Little girl brutally murdered after FB's privacy controls reveal her to a crazy stalker"
People just don't respond to rational argument, data, and talk the way they do to fear. Obviously for the little girl's sake I hope this never happens, but honestly I don't see Facebook going down any other way anytime soon.
Facebook's earlier negatives were more in line with employers screening you out of jobs or tracking your use (http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/social-media-misuse/)
Now with privacy being the big story, this may evolve to more of what you suggest, though there are already horror stories: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1256552/Facebook-sta...
It's not clear what drives the stories/cultural view, though 146's comment about having a viable alternative seems to be important in actually causing people to quit a service.
Who are the 'facebook enemies'?
> Facebook is only evil as long as saying Facebook is evil is driving traffic, is my takeaway from this.
It's about what happens to news in a lucrative, competitive environment. The reason we haven't had to use the term "yellow journalism" since the turn of the last century is because the market for news was so stagnant.
Now there's a new, robust market, and we're seeing a lot of the same tactics all over again.
I guess not RTFA and commenting on the title alone isn't isolated to Slashdot. er... I actually knew that but this thread shows it splendourly (is that a word?).
Anyway, the actual meat of the article, although a known issue for those who have any interest in the media business, would give HNers an opportunity for some shots at Techcrunch (pottle/kettle).
The internet isn't much different than television on this regard. There's a popular, hot topic one week that vanishes on the other. The blond girl that has gone missing happens every couple years. The media reports the case extensively, then another shiny topic comes, and it's dropped. Of course, boys/girls gone missing/kidnapped happens way more frequently than every two years, but sometimes through some crazy conjunction of factors, one is disproportionally reported.