Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Facebook?
Well, it seems that I was a tad ill-timed in declaring widespread praise for Facebook last week. Over the past few days, bloggers have been making a stink over Facebook employees defacing and deleting profiles at will on nothing more than a personal grudge. Of course, Valleywag has been all over this of late - but they aren't the only ones. This is nothing all that new, as I realized when they began taking a harsh line toward fake/tribute profiles, but it is also nothing new in a broader perspective.
Much of the criticism of Facebook in these privacy scandals has centered around an assumed standard of web-based interaction, in which a user on a social network can trust that his/her profile will not be deleted unless s/he is a spam profile or seriously abusing it - so much so that it is commonly assumed that these services are rife with pedophiles. So how is it that all of a sudden, the Facebook criticism meme centers on it being overly strict?
Facebook is suffering from the perception that is has a degree of power that it does not actually have. It - like any other online social network - depends solely and entirely on its users. So far it has done a good job of wooing them: first college students (the popularity among whom the tech 'sphere seemed to miss entirely...), then Web 2.0 types (after the Facebook Platform). But here we are in the downturn of the hype cycle, right after everyone has finished gushing over how awesome it is. The Web 2.0/Valley hype built up Facebook to a point where it has seemed all powerful (not to mention valued at $15 billion) - it's the future of advertising! That's worth several small countries, right?
Facebook - and all popular online social networks - are socially, culturally, and subjectively significant. There's no denying that, especially in an era when most of our personal and professional lives interact with the web. Yet the hype and its resulting over-valuation (yes, it is over valued) have made people somehow believe that we are locked into it. Haven't we learned from Friendster? Haven't we learned from basic market economics? If Facebook continues violating what we view as basic tenets, its user-base is as good as gone, and it becomes another social network graveyard like Friendster (in the US at least).
We, as users, have a choice here. Personally, I don't particularly like the idea that Facebook has essentially sold 1.6% of my profile to Microsoft - but as long as the social relations that it allows remain more valuable than any other service, I will continue to use it. And when Facebook finally overwhelms me with inane 3rd party application requests and breaches of trust and privacy? Well, that's when I'm off to the next service, whatever my social network might collectively decide that is.
Subjectively, we are tied to Facebook more than we like to acknowledge, but when it comes to their business model, that's where we can hurt them. Facebook is still the emperor who is trying to convince us he has clothes on - and they're doing a fine job - but unless they get some clothes on soon, users should really just see them for what they are.