Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now, sharing with everybody would be the starting point, rather than with a small group of friends. Is this more about reflecting social norms or changing them to help Facebook compete with Twitter?
The statement, made during a livestream of the Crunchies awards, hits on a hot button issue for Facebook: it recently notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification. While the message claimed that Facebook was displaying the message to give users more privacy controls, blindly clicking “next” was a way to make much of your data public. And in fact, some data like the Friends List has become more public without any settings changes by users.
Zuckerberg: Sharing is the “Social Norm”
Zuckerberg’s statement to interviewer Michael Arrington avoids any major “gotcha” quotes, subtly implying that Facebook’s move is a reaction to societal changes but carefully avoiding any mention of Twitter’s (
) role in those changes. The full quote, picked up in a very well-written post by Marshall Kirkpatrick this weekend, emphasizes “social norms” and “evolution”:
When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.
Change was Inevitable
Critics of Facebook’s move will probably find support: Facebook’s user base is notoriously resistive to change, and yet nearly every major change, with the exception of the failed Beacon project, has seen a huge surge in popularity for the company. Facebook users were certainly opposed to its expansion beyond colleges, but it’s hard to argue that the service has become less useful as a result.
So now Facebook () is becoming a catalyst of social change, a transition that’s likely to be somewhat painful for all of us. Twitter dramatically lowered the barriers to content creation, and thus sharing our day-to-day lives became effortless. But it was Facebook that took the trend mainstream, affecting 300 million+ people worldwide.
My take: Zuck is right, the change was inevitable. If Facebook hadn’t pushed this forward, Google () would have inevitably made our lives more public in its quest to make all the world’s information accessible (yes, that includes information about individuals). And if not Google, then Twitter … the trend started there and Twitter’s growth would have gradually defined the standard in sharing.
Public sharing as the default was unavoidable, but Facebook has pushed the trend forward faster than any of us might have expected. It’s a concept that will take some getting used to.
source: http://mashable.com/2010/01/10/facebook-founder-on-privacy/
I can't figure out if this is better marketing for NECCO or for Twitter. On the one hand, you will have the increased exposure of the tweeting culture to a wide candy-hungry audience (which will likely include some who have absolutely no idea what tweeting is referring to), and on the other, you will have a generation of Twitterers possibly considering Sweethearts over circus peanuts the next time they go to buy candy. I guess it's a win-win. Sweethearts are also coming in new colors and flavors.
To give credit where it's due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier's report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow). It's thanks to her, then, that we know Google's market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.
