Facebook Cover Of Time Magazine : A Defining Moment?
There is a movie about Facebook in production at the moment and coming out at the end of the year featuring among others singer Justin Timberlake and it will tell the story of Facebook in the early days. If truth be told they should have waited a while because there is some great drama happening at the moment around Facebook and their privacy issues. There are always concerns over Facebook privacy but this time things are a lot more serious, you know when you are on the front cover of Time magazine for the wrong reasons then something has gone wrong in terms of PR. So just how serious are things forFacebook at the moment….
Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Many would say the announcements a couple of weeks ago about the open graph but the real trouble started a year ago when Facebook introduced Fan pages and actively encouraged brands and businesses to engage on the platform. Business and pleasure don’t mix right? The problem is that Facebook was once a great secure and private network where you could catch up with friends knowing that you wouldn’t get spammed. Facebook then needed to start making money by switching on hyper targeted advertising and the platform started changing massively in it’s very nature. You can’t store people’s photos and private data promising them a secure network only to open it up for anybody to see at a later date and that is why there is so much anger at the moment in the online community.
Crossroads Moment
It’s not all bad for Facebook because they are just about to announce 500 Million users (yes that is half a billion) but you do get the feeling that this is very much a crossroads moment for the company. Does it kick on now and go on to be the first social network to reach 1 billion users and continue to be a central and more important part of our life or is this the pinnacle of Facebook’s success and do they take the same route as Myspace and get replaced but something new and more private? I would personally say that they will kick on from this but it just serves to remind us all that no matter how big a company or service gets it can still go wrong very very quickly.
The Catch 22 Situation
So how do Facebook go about fixing this mess? Well the big problem is that if they back down and say that they pushed the limits too far then there is a clear admission of guilt, do that and Facebook faces more backlash, a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. The other side of the coin is to do nothing and keep their head in the sand and not listen to the public outcry but the the outcry has been going on for a couple of weeks now and if anything seems to be getting even louder. If I was Facebook I’d be working pretty hard on PR at the moment and trying to get a solution to their problems because they are losing a lot of trust in their brand. Facebook is still by far the biggest social network but they need to get this sorted fast.
What Do You Think?
I thought a quick poll here would give us a good idea as to what people think about the current privacy settings on Facebook and if it is changing the way you use the platform?
Comments