DISQUS

alan p · 1 year ago

@ Nic....my view tallies with yours - this is sensitive stuff, far more so than user feeds when I can see who is throwing dead sheep at who. In fact, research shows we are often more willing to share our sex lives than our financial ones.

I think anyone who studies social nets "gets" that friendship groups run on trust, not utility. I think Facebook confused what they had - friendnets - with the sort of contact nets business people have, and assumed because the "Social Graph" looked the same, it worked the same - which has to make you wonder how well they "grok" the underlying dynamics of social nets (hmmm...I feel a post coming on).

When I wrote the stuff a month or so ago it was because I immediately grasped how the system *had* to work (blows own trumpet) and thus could see (especially in the light of the hubris of the "100 Year Revolution" announcement) the likely abuses that a company struggling to make a $15bn valuation could carry out.

Re PR...a fortnight ago I was at the NMK event on PR and made a rude comment (or 2) about Facebook's PR - I definitely felt as if I'd farted in church, and was later told by a number of people, in no uncertain terms, that Facebook's PR was the best in the business.

If that is so then their tactics of staying shtum are absolutely deliberate, and they have clearly calculated that the storm in a blogcup will blow over. Lets see if it works.....

kerry · 1 year ago

ironic that the anti-spam word that is showing up now is "MSFT"--given the topic is about privacy and arrogance.

however, this time microsoft looks like a trusted provider compared to the mistakes of facebook and lest we not forget Google.

Is the PR failure at Facebook a function of immaturity or is it something more endemic and therefore more problematic?