pebkac thoughts

Facebook has apparently backpedaled on beacon. Beacon will not publish to your feed without explicit permission the first time any vendor tries to publish. At that time you can choose whether to block that vendor, prompt every time, or allow the vendor to publish every time. The most important bit is that apparently it will never be possible for somebody who has taken no initial, pro-active step to have something published to their feed by a vendor.

While this isn’t perfect, It’s much closer to what I think most people who objected to beacon would have wanted, including me. I think I might even be able to live with the feature… but I feel burned by the way this was rolled out and the way the fallout was handled. Eg. this NYTimes quote:

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

What got under my skin there was the ‘not well understood’ bit. I got angry enough that I searched for Mr.  Palihapitiya on facebook and sent him a[n angry] note. I didn’t expect a response. Surprise! I got one:

hi cristobal. its unfortunate that you are deciding to leave facebook. i hope that you change your mind in light of the recent changes we have made to beacon. we are sorry if the original implementation was confusing or violated your expectations - that wasn’t our intent. our goal was to give you more information that you could choose to share with your friends. while the first implementation clearly wasn’t ideal, we will learn from this and it will help our future products get better. separately, as we continue to get feedback on beacon itself, we will continue to optimize this experience as well.

thanks for listening and i hope you do reconsider leaving facebook.

thanks,
chamath

While this does make me feel significantly better,  it shouldn’t have taken 50 thousand users signing up for a protest group to get there. It should not have taken any pressure, especially after the newsfeeds fiasco of a year ago. With that rollout, privacy controls were put in place to placate in excess of 90 thousand angry users, and I vividly remember the “Calm Down. Breathe. We hear you.” message from Zuckerberg. So condescending!

Did they not learn from the newsfeeds fiasco? Why can’t they do phased rollouts? Why can’t they make new features voluntary as they roll them out? Why are they so condescending? Zuckmeister: I know you went to Harvard, but jeez! You might actually be smarter, faster, and more attractive than every single person using your site, but if we think that you genuinely feel that way… maybe you’ll make more money? Is that it? Did you make the targeted decision to be the bad guy, cause a stink because you knew it would get you press? Even if you lost all 55,000 members of the protest group, you’d get so much exposure in the news and you’ll pick up that many new freshmen next year anyway? Is that it? That’d be even more disgusting.

Newsfeeds annoyed me, but by the time I logged in and saw what was going on there were already privacy controls. This, though… this is the second time. I’m not waiting for a third. I’ve already eviscerated my profile, and as soon as I manage to dump contact info from facebook I’ll be gone. I’ve already signed up on socializr and I’ll be looking at other tools, too. I’m dumping facebook.