facebook drama

A lot of people this week are talking about the Facebook Debacle.

The apophenia blog says:

i wonder when companies will start thinking of their users as constituents and think about engaging them before executing major changes to the foundation of their social interaction. Of course, i recognize it's a tradeoff. Companies don't want to leak what they're doing pre-launch but if they change things radically, they piss off their core members. And the core members disengage emotionally because they don't feel as though they're a part of the system.

This is precisely the problem, and well-stated. I perceive this is less about privacy and more about culture. The students joke about the "facebook stalking" they did before the recent change, and how that's broken now. Fact was, the creators of facebook weren't sensitive to how the students were actually using the tool. They didn't understand the culture that grew from the tool that they'd created. As another blogger noted, Facebook broke its culture. They're back-pedaling now, but I think the damage has been done. Students might still use it (and professors might still look up student faces on there to learn names!) but the bloom is definitely off the rose.