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Facebook CEO delivers apology

So Mark realized that he was in trouble and decided to write an open letter to the Facebook community apologizing for not "thinking through" the new feature. It was probably a good idea given the fact that nearly 90% of the Facebook community were lashing back on the new "mini-feed" and "news feed" claiming that it went too far and invaded their privacy.

Mark notes here, "Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away." As mentioned from the intern IDIs and FGs, there seems to be a necessity for user control in any social networking site. Although young people these days are actually making more personal information available than any other generation, these young people felt that the news feeds were going too far and took away their control over their profiles and activities. A girl interviewed by the CBS evening news stated that the immediate broadcast of her broken relationship made her feel really uncomfortable around the people she knew.

Mark also says: " So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over." As social networking sites proliferate due to user content and word-0f-mouth, it is crucial that any successful social networking site caters to the users it serves. Honestly, these privacy controls should've been in place when "news feeds" were introduced. And who knows? This feature may have been welcomed rather than hated.

News feeds and mini feeds were great ideas that were executed poorly. At least the CEO heard the voices of the users.

posted by Koh @ 6:03 PM