The Unraveling of Facebook!!
- Details
- Category: Jeremy Addis-Mills
- Published on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 12:40
- Written by Jaddis-Mills
In the last 6 years, Facebook has exploded into a billion dollar social networking platform, destroyed Myspace, and more recently spawned a popular Hollywood movie that drew in $23 million during its first weekend. This has brought about the popular belief that Facebook is the model for the new Internet. As a result, we have seen thousands of campaigns,
marketing firms, and businesses all run to Facebook to try to cash in on its online access to millions of users. While this mad dash is occurring, I am questioning whether Facebook will be able to survive in the long run and wonder if we are all just waiting for the next best thing?
We have seen that social networking on the Internet has taken many forms. We saw it as American Online, Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. Each of these platforms/websites has seen a time where they were the place to be. It is like we all wanted to sit at the Friendster table, but then the new kid started at our school whose parents let them throw parties on the weekend and we all jumped ship and sat at his table (I.E. Facebook, Myspace, the next big thing). In fact, I was a Myspace person until my network of friends all moved to Facebook and the only option I had was to move over there to maintain my status at the cool kids table. Currently, we are all at the cool kids table but will we stay or will we jump ship when the next cool kid comes to town? Facebook has provided some great features in the past 6 years that made networking and marketing easier but there are some major issues that are leaving Facebook ripe for the picking.
Over the course of this past year, Facebook has been forced to acknowledge vulnerabilities to their users' personal information. This included the feature affectionately called by John P. Mello Jr., PCWorld, "We Own Your World." This 3rd party, instant personalization function automatically allowed third party users (Pandora, etc.) to gather data from people's Facebook page to instantly personalize their experience on these third party websites. This automatic default of allowing the data to be shared was instantly seen as a betrayal of the average user's privacy. To complicate the matter, the newly added "Places" function that allows users to identify exact geographical location was found to allow outside users access to people's location data even when privacy settings were marked.
The final installment in Facebook's unraveling hit the news just yesterday. It was uncovered and subsequently acknowledged by Facebook that a security hole has been discovered in their online user platform. This security breach allowed profile data from users to be passed to online marketing firms. Mike Vernal on Facebook's Developers blog claimed that the reports in both the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have over exaggerated the security risk.
Whether Facebook is right and these issues are overly exaggerated or they are lying through their teeth, the future of Facebook remains to be seen, but users consider their personal information on Facebook to be private. The more the corporate titans at Facebook attempts to profit from data miners, advertisers, etc. the more users are going to be ripe for the picking. The question is now where is the next cool kid? The only thing left is for someone else to create a social network that will at least intrigue users in order to do to Facebook what Facebook has did to Myspace. Facebook is nailing the coffin shut on its own success and I think it maybe too late for them to fix it.
Then again, I could be predicting this all wrong and this could very well be my "I invented the Internet" moment.
