The Zuckerberg Response

It's just hard to be mad at the guy when he writes something like this. This is CEO 2.0, a real person who says he's sorry without blaming anyone else. Nicely done. You can read it on his facebook blog here.

"About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I'd like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn't on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we've heard about from you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mark"

Comments

[Cam Beck]

What, no "I'm sorry if you misinterpreted our intent?"

Not bad. I'll give him that.

[CK]

Nicely done. Not sure if you've worked on the spin side but this is most definitely a key messaging point fed to him:

"Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information."

Yup, he got it in there. That is fine tuned and "just 2.0 enough with the words 'share' and 'control' in there." See, the 'spin' is, to turn it back to what we 'gave' people. PR 101 not 2.0.

Thanks for running this. He did a nice job and most won't see through it and will just like the guy. I'm thinking of the users and his history with pissing 'em off several times. But hey, that's just how I roll.

Have a great week--you rock (and you should be the one owning FB. For real.).

[CK]

Oh, don't forget to give yourself credit, man. Your sage post from last week predicted this. To almost a 't' (see I read you, regularly).

Yup. You are one smartie. Is the link above for that one? Bye.

[Cam Beck]

Paul may not own Facebook, but he definitely has them pwned! ;)

[Ryan Watkins]

I commented that Zuckerberg's strategy was both immoral and ingenious a few weeks back. I assumed there would be a re-tooling of Beacon, but I had no idea he would come out and admit fault and do something to appease the user-base.

It says a lot when only 50,000 of your millions of users (with a little help from us bloggers and the media) are the catalyst for such a drastic change of plans... Oh, and that crazy law in New York probably didn't help.

[whater]

Greed. Pure and simple. You think at this stage of the game 2.zero cares that much about his users? If he did he would never have pulled a crap stunt like this. These guys are getting paid while everyone else is getting played. Sincerity, I think not since he past the point of no return weeks ago. Why all the fuss about privacy? Most of the knuckleheads who go onto these social networking sites share the last time they wiped their butt. Take a nap!

[Paul McEnany]

Me? Prediction? :)

And you're on to something, there, CK. He definitely made beacon sound like something for the users and not a way to make money. bs. But I'm also sticking around, so there ya go.

Cam- Nice use of the word pwned! :)

Ryan- It does take you aback a bit when you see someone in his position so freely admit mistakes. It's kind of refreshing. I guess we'll just have to hope that his next post isn't an apology (like the one below it).

Whater- You're an idiot. Go back to playing with your atari. People running business isn't necessarily greed. For better or for worse, the internet isn't all about group hugs and back rubs, money is what helps a lot of the innovation happen. You've got to find a balance. Zuck crossed the line, he apologized for it, and backed off. Let's move on. Nothing more to see here.

[Ken Barber]

"I'm not proud of the way we handled this and I think we can do better"

This is my favorite line. I think he could have been a bit stronger to say we screwed up and put advertisers in front of our members, but I like this line. I used the title "There's a lot you can learn from a 23-year-old" when I blogged about this last week. And I think that's still true. --Ken
see posting at: http://purethinking.typepad.com/pure_thinking_a_streamofc/2007/12/you-can-learn-a.html