It's been a long time since it got in
the way of the World Series, but the threat of seismic tumult still
hangs over Silicon Valley. When earthquakes elsewhere in the world
dominate the news, people get a little more sensitive to their own
vulnerability in the Bay Area. The ground might really have just given a
twitch. Is it moving?
Comparing Facebook's latest product modifications to deadly natural
disasters is probably a little bit inappropriate, but the psychological
reaction doesn't seem all that different. The social network modified
its policies for handling user data once again as part of its F8
conference and release of the Open Graph API, and ever since it
became clear that more information is being set as public by default and
more is being shared with third parties, concerned Facebook users have
been on jittery alert, perhaps prone to overreaction, concerned that
something even bigger may be about to change.
They might be freaking out a little too much. Still, the lesson to be
learned from this bizarre analogy is that dealing with social media is
more like disaster preparedness than you would think.
On Wednesday, one small but
alarming security hole was found in Facebook; the company attributed
it to an engineering bug, and patched it. On Thursday, PC
World detailed that Facebook was "secretly adding" third-party
applications to user profiles, something that the company once again
attributed to a bug and said that it had been fixed. Investor-pundit
Paul Kedrosky and fanboy idol Peter Rojas, former editor of Engadget and
co-founder of GDGT, both announced on Thursday that they were
deactivating their Facebook profiles.
Basically, Facebook is the Pacific Ring
of the Web. In its six-year
history the company has radically changed its product by
implementing one small, step-by-step move after another. Recently
published excerpts from David Kirkpatrick's forthcoming book "The
Facebook Effect" recall small Facebook features and quirks that were
quietly snuffed from the site, like the random placement of the "Wedding
Crashers" quote "I don't even know what a quail looks like" under its
search query field. Cue a few thousand early Facebook users saying, "Oh,
yeah, I remember that!"
How do you bust up a giant landmass into seven pieces without anybody
noticing? Slowly. How do you turn an uptight,
closed-off Web business built by a few college students into a
sprawling creature that seems capable of sharing anything with anyone
anywhere? Very, very slowly. But when something big happens, people
start to notice the small stuff that they wish they'd seen earlier.
Concerned Facebook members are now acting like the social network has
grown into something beyond their control, that even lawmakers might not
be able to do much good, that the company is acting more like an
unpredictable force of nature than a business run by, well, humans.
Which is funny, because these days Facebook is playing up its human
side, its fallibility.
After Wednesday's privacy glitch caused Facebook to temporarily
disable its chat feature while all the bugs were fixed, The
New York Times quoted the company's vice president of public
policy, Elliot Schrage, as saying, "Are we perfect? Of course not." We
should be getting used to the fact that an "iterative"
product model, the sort of practice that's become commonplace now
that pushing out new features no longer requires waiting for the next
release of a shrink-wrapped software package, will mean imperfections.
It will mean screw-ups. It will mean bugs that are quickly patched and
poorly thought-out features that are pulled in due time, but they were
there in the first place, and user data may have been affected in the
process. These are Facebook's tectonic plates, and we are just riding
around on them.
This is disconcerting, and perhaps unethical. It's provoked concern
among lawmakers, anger among activist groups, and fear among
Facebook members. But, for better or for worse, this is how Facebook has
been working for the past six years, and the Web at large may finally
be coming to that sort of understanding.
The ground is moving at Facebook, and it always has been. The social
network can credit a big portion of its success to this ability and
willingness to keep changing while some of its industry
brethren--MySpace, Digg--kept products relatively static and are now
suffering the consequences. This doesn't mean that Facebook's
unstoppable by any means, though. Maybe the coalition of U.S. senators
petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to rein in social networks'
handling of user data a bit will be effective, and Facebook will be
forced to stabilize the iteration of its service a bit; this, in turn,
could mean that its lightning-speed innovation could be curbed as red
tape and roadblocks go up, making it more likely that another service
could race in and start chewing at its market share.
Or members could, of course, just leave--and Facebook's business
model is only as good as the 400 million people who inhabit it. But
people choose to live in areas prone to deadly natural disasters, too.
Living your life (or a portion of it) on the Web and entrusting personal
data to social-media services like Facebook means that you're agreeing
to colonize a product that's subject to change and unexpected error.
This is true for many services besides Facebook, too. Twitter's shown
hints of major expansion plans. Location-based networking start-ups have
an appetite for marketing partnership dollars and a whole lot of
private data in their coffers. Then there's Blippy, the new, edgy
purchase-sharing start-up that accidentally
exposed several users' credit card numbers last month.
You could choose to err on the side of paranoia, assume that Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is greedily dreaming of how awesome it will be when
he sells everyone's data to marketers and uses the profits to buy
himself a private island, and delete your Facebook account. Or you could
just be aware, be cautious, and figure that maybe your credit card data
is something you want to keep off of Facebook for now.
Because while Facebook is the company it is today--subject to
constant and frequent volatility, eager to tread into new marketing and
networking territory--this is how it's going to be.