In Defense of Facebook

May 20th, 2010

By Joe Procopio

Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute.

Look, I’m being somewhat facetious. I’m not here to defend Facebook’s data grab or privacy-shirking shenanigans, the backdoor selling or the opt-in, shmopt-in mentality that’s become the norm over the last few months.

I hated Facebook before hating Facebook was cool. I’ve got Interweb evidence of rants dating well back into the mid-oughts when I was tossing out pointed phrases like “perverted popularity” and “a car crash is not sustainable.”

Turns out, it’s actually quite sustainable, and Facebook keeps trying to sell tickets.

But I’m not deleting my Facebook account live online today, and neither should you.

Imagine Facebook with 1000-word status updates. That’s Intrepid Media, the quirky creative community I started 10 years ago. I’ve been building that and other things like it for as long as things like that have gotten built. I’ve been through the dot-bomb and script kiddies and the blogosphere and Web 2.0 and every other meme that’s been created to try to prop up what’s essentially still the AOL model. Which was the Compuserve model.

My point is I’ve seen this episode already. All of this has happened before, only now Grandma’s frakking everything up.

Let’s Talk About Privacy

Any techie worth their salt will tell you that putting information on the web is akin to screaming it while standing naked at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on a sunny day with a pink poodle in one hand and a boombox playing “In Your Eyes” in the other. And I’m talking about data straight sitting in a database with a wire connected to port 80.

Don’t even get me started on slapping your social security number or your “People To Kill” list into a form on somebody’s probably poorly coded and laxly secured result of an entry into a business plan contest.

Think of the Internet as a city full of giant rooms, which is not even close but it’s a better analogy than a series of pipes. A bank site is a big vault for your bank account number and your money. There are all sorts of completely ridiculous regulations and locks and keys, and even they don’t work all the time.

A shopping site is like, well, a store. You shop the ones you trust, you use your credit card because it’s got an extra layer of purchase protection.

Facebük

Facebook and all other social sites are like nightclubs. And yeah, it’s awesome to go in there and let loose and have some fun. They’re also quite useful and really great things can come out of them. But you wouldn’t leave your checkbook, your drunken love letters to your college crush, or your iPhone prototype laying on the bar.

And the crazy thing is, thanks to weak passwords, casual gaming, and… I’m sorry for this but the brains out there that to this day still think “Sonja McTicklish? Do I know a Sonja McTicklish? I might. Let me click on this link to her photos and find out,” we’re dealing with the equivalent of people leaving checkbooks all over the place. It’s an evildoers dream!

WWW Still Means Wild Wild West

What Facebook is trying to do with the data isn’t wrong or unethical, it’s the way they’re doing it. There’s experimentation with new models that will make financial success out of this quagmire of information and there’s Google listening in while sniffing networks and snapping candid photos in your neighborhood that one time you’re washing your car without a shirt. One is right, one is wrong.

But since there’s no sheriff in town, and even if there was it’d be the authoritative equivalent of the United Nations in an Austin Powers movie, it makes sense to be a little extra careful with what you type into the pretty box.

Yes. Facebook is messing with your data and they’re being jerks about it, trying to fool and/or trick and/or con you into giving them permission (or in the worst cases, for your friends to give them permission), to start mining you. My question is: What is all that data doing on Facebook in the first place?

Let’s Talk About Friends

Facebook started life as a way to connect with friends.

But it’s a lazy way. And it’s a new way. There are extremely valid use cases for a Facebook roster of friends if the information you’re doling out to them is the right kind of information. If my kid scores his first soccer goal, the entire world should know that.

But I can think of around 100-200 friends who should have my personal phone number, 50-100 of those who should know where I live, and exactly two who should know just what I said to my boss when I saw him out with that chick who isn’t his wife. But only one of those should know why I got fired for posting that on some stupid website somewhere.

None of that belongs on Facebook. That’s what email, the phone, and the corner bar are for.

Meet the New Boss

And here we go again. In response to these very bad things, and to reiterate, I do understand that Facebook has done some very bad things, a pack of NYU students are building the next Facebook (Awesome! That’s never been attempted before!), and they’re going to do it right. But the very next question, just as it was the very next question when people started talking about Facebook back in the mid-oughts is, and I quote: “What’s the revenue model?”

In other words, how do you sustain something like that when your very demanding user base suddenly decides they want to suck bandwidth by posting videos of their kid picking his nose and you’re not making it easy and/or fast enough?

Damn. I know. I sound like Steve Freaking Ballmer. Devil’s advocate.

But all of this has happened before… the answer is they’ll get fast and loose with whatever information you give them.

—

Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Company, a technical and management consulting firm (intrepidcompany.com) that has spun out publishing company/creative network Intrepid Media (intrepidmedia.com) and digital incubator ExitEvent (exitevent.com). It should be known that 2/3 of his Facebook friends are made-up personas. He can be reached at joe@intrepidcompany.com or twitter @jproco.

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In Defense of Facebook

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