Response to Jason Calacanis’ newsletter “Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?”
Response to Jason Calacanis’ newsletter “Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?”:
I am not sure if I would call Facebook clueless or unlucky. Maybe envious or a bit jealous of what Twitter and others who chose to setup their platforms / networks as open to the public from the get go. Though it is important to look at what your competition is doing and constantly innovating / making changes to stay ahead, you can’t do that at the expense of your customers / users. In a conversation that we had on Friday evening at the meetup, you talked about the culture and past leadership at AOL You mentioned they were very marketing driven and because of it had some of the highest CPM on their homepage but weren’t product driven and lost the concept of what their users wanted. What Facebook is doing reminds me of what AOL once did. People came to Facebook because it offered a sense of privacy. Unlike MySpace it was a closed network which made users feel safe. Despite the changes I can assure you the average user still thinks that is the case.
When logging into Facebook today there was a new event in my list titled “Phone is gone…..need numbers.” an event / trend that has become popular amongst the younger Facebook users. There is no easier way to get your phone numbers back when you lose your phone than asking “your” network of friends to respond with them. Within hours there were quite a few people that responded openly with their numbers. They are assuming that those numbers are only being seen by their network of friends. I don’t think they will be to happy to find those numbers in Google search results and live on the web.