aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Zuckerberg/Facebook chronicles (continued)
Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa yesterday; Kara helpfully translates it for us:
I would surely like to zombie-bite those annoying reporters, the whiny privacy advocates and those cut-and-run advertisers, who obviously don’t understand my $15 billion worth of genius. I wonder if I could find a way to blame the Winklevosses.
Fred thinks the Zuckerberg spanking is “ridiculous and smacks of jealousy...”
His approach to opt-in v opt-out is appealing and he forgives Facebook’s missteps on the grounds that they’re dealing with a very hard problem. But I wonder, isn’t this slip-up just like the newsfeeds blunder?
It seems they don’t learn from them and these missteps are all of a kind. They let the critics shape the perception of the feature/function when what they should do is get out their with their users and shape that perception themselves. They either underestimate or just don’t trust their users to get it.
Jay Meattle says the RIP Facebook prognostications are premature. Unique visitors jumped 20% in November. Still, he concludes:
It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.
Well, yes.
To that end, no doubt, Facebook now forwards messages. Michael Arrington says, Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
Before tonight, Facebook just sent an email saying that a new message was received, forcing me to click on the message and log into Facebook before I could actually read it.
Tonight Facebook changed that policy. Suddenly, Facebook messages are actually forwarded to my outside email address, letting me read it and decide if it’s important enough to click on to Facebook and respond.
This is great. It’s frickin wonderful, even. And Facebook clearly did this even though it reduces page views from people clicking on those messages just to see what they say.
No word yet on whether that changes the Facebook self-destruction Cory Doctorow foresees.
RELATED: The story as told by the NYTimes.
