Arc and Angle

Up until now, I’ve steered clear of making any judgments concerning Mark Zuckerman, the so-called boy-genius creator of Facebook. The entire time he was in charge of Facebook, his mantra was always, “User privacy is sacred!”

It is the foundation of Facebook. It is what set it apart from Friendster. It is why I was happy to defend Facebook against a few of my Friendster-loyalist friends. They could disagree about aesthetics and cool features (remember those diagrams showing you how many friends-away a person is connected to you by?). But I always fell back on the fact that I loved how much control I had over my privacy settings. I could block strangers from getting almost anything. I could show my mom my pictures but not my wall. It was the clear winner.

In public statements, he is now singing a different tune touting ridiculous arguments supporting the idea that basically, it is the natural evolution of our tech-centric times that we are simply going to have to adjust to less privacy and more openness.

One of my favorite social media sites, ReadWriteWeb wrote a great article that argues that in this case, users aren’t choosing to be less private. They are being told that they want less privacy. ReadWriteWeb’s: “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over”

I predict Facebook is about to alienate a lot of people and it’s only a matter of time before an open-source social networking tool changes the playing field. In short, they’re digging their own grave. Mark: Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Do yourself a favor and separate yourself from this debacle before you become the Microsoft of Social Networking.