I generally
stand on the side of commerce, and there's no question Facebook needs to justify its massive valuation by monetizing its massive audience. I also know it's much easier to be an armchair CEO, kibitzing
and criticizing from the sidelines, than to actually lead a big company in a dynamic market environment, under pressure from investors and the press and the public and politicians. Still: this was not
the right way for Facebook to introduce a new business strategy.
Zuckerberg and co. must have known that the new Open Graph program -- which shares information about members with other Web
sites -- was going to stir some controversy. Their previous privacy debacle with Beacon should be seared into their collective corporate memory, and they also had more recent instructive examples,
like Google's Buzz backlash, to remind them that privacy issues are not to be trifled with. Rightly or wrongly, new features that are totally above-board -- meaning, 100% legal and covered by existing
user agreements -- can still trigger alarm. Extreme caution is warranted, lest they kill their $30 billion goose before it lays a single golden egg.
In that context, you'd think they would
make a special effort to resolve existing privacy issues before launching the new feature. From a public relations perspective, any privacy screw-ups will seriously handicap their attempt persuade
users and regulation-happy politicians to accept the controversial new program. From a purely technical or operational perspective, they are committing themselves to a two-front war, fighting a
rear-guard action against existing problems while venturing into a new minefield of potential glitches (as a guy I'm apparently compelled to turn this into WWII).
So it doesn't exactly
instill confidence when users report a raft of problems with the existing Facebook service. In just the last few days, Facebook has stumbled in a couple areas. The most serious transgression: on
Wednesday TechCrunch reported that users who clicked on the "Preview my profile" option were able to view their friends' live chats and unanswered, pending friend requests.
This is a big,
big screw-up: it doesn't get much more private than an individual's live chats. I don't even know what kind of stuff was made public, but there is obviously a high potential for embarrassing,
personally damaging repercussions -- the kind that lead to lawsuits. Facebook responded by temporarily shutting down chat while its engineers went in to fix the problem -- but as many bloggers pointed
out, nobody really knows how long this chink in the armor was open, and it raises the question how many more undiagnosed glitches there are sprinkled throughout the system.
Meanwhile there
are reports on other blogs that Facebook's system doesn't always respond to requests to make profiles, or parts of profiles, private -- something that will surely come up more often as users react to
the Open Graph changes. I don't want to take the conspiracy theory line, but is it a coincidence that the site appears to be ignoring privacy requests when it is just about to implement a new
monetization strategy which relies on sharing user information? This would be the height of folly, of course, but it's curious: why can't a site that instantly processes chats and personal updates
perform what is surely the single most important interactive function?