Facebook's Mea Culpa
The News Feed and Min-Feed features launched last week have caused quite a bit of controversy. Seems that many Facebook users were less than impressed by the functionality, but more importantly, they were very upset by the implications to their privacy and data management issues. A public aplogy on Facebook's blog by Mark Zuckerberg is trying to clear things up.
Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.
It will be interesting to see how this latest chapter plays out vis-a-vis their user base. Fred reports that The Students Against Facebook News Feed group is almost 700K users, representing 8% of their user base. "If the equivalent happened in Myspace, the group would have grown to 8 million people. In two days." More from Fred, here, here, and here. That last link is an excellent post, btw.
Technorati Tags: social.networks, facebook
Saturday, September 09, 2006
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