Farewell to Facebook
I’ve closed my Facebook account. Or, rather, since one can’t close a Facebook account per se, I’ve deleted friends and removed all that I could from my profile. Finally, I set my account to ‘inactive’ in Facebook, which is as close as one can come to deleting it.
I opened my account back in March 2004, when Facebook was a small, quiet, private site open only to few colleges around the country. I never amassed more than 400 friends (I think my final tally was somewhere in the low 300s), but it was a nice way to vaguely keep in touch. I found myself checking in on the site perhaps once or twice a month, if that.
Back in September 2006, I defended Facebook’s mini-feed, with the tagline of “If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before.” My logic there was that the mini-feed didn’t expose any information that wasn’t available before, it just made it far more accessible. I did find it bad marketing on Facebook’s part to launch it without even so much as an opt-out option available, but I figured they’d learn from that mistake in the future. Finally, I found it a touch ironic that all the “Stop the New Facebook” groups grew virally in large part thanks to the very mini-feed they were railing against. In the end, Facebook made it possible to opt-out and control what was posted in the mini-feed, restoring the option to maintain the security-through-obscurity regime that many of its users had accustomed themselves to.
Facebook didn’t learn from its mistakes. Beacon, which differs from the mini-feed in the important aspect that it reveals previously non-public information to the public (and select Facebook advertisers). Where the mini-feed merely made what was already knowable easier to know, Beacon published previously unknowable information for all to see. Once again, without even so much as an opt-out provision at the start, though this has since been added.
Beacon, combined with Facebook’s slow slide towards something resembling selling out, convinced me that the small, quiet, cool way to keep in touch with friends online that I knew from March 2004 was gone forever. I “closed” my account, as best I could, having to put up with the final indignity of having to delete each of my 300+ friends one by one.
Fundamentally, Facebook is trying to reconcile its revenue model with what makes people use its site. The weakness of its traditional banner ad model is that people ignore the banners and instead look to see what their friends are up to. Beacon tried to one-up this by putting ads into what their friends were up to. Rent a movie from Blockbuster? Facebook will let your friends know what you rented and when, so they can rent it from Blockbuster too, which conceivably gives Facebook a cut. An ingenious idea, except, as Seth Godin puts it: “People don’t truly care about privacy . . . What people care about is being surprised.” Had Facebook allowed people to opt-in to Beacon from the start, those people who wanted to then could do so, and they would not be surprised to find their rentals being broadcast to their friends. In fact, they’d be happy that the service they opted into was working. Instead, we have a nasty shock to all Facebook users who suddenly find that their previously private actions on Facebook advertisers’ sites are suddenly — without clear warning or any action on their part — being broadcast to all their friends. Worse: without a way to turn it off. This caused the uproar and backlash.
Farewell Facebook.