Love–and Being a CEO–Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 5, 2007 at 4:54 PM PT
So, Mark Zuckerberg apologized.
Yes, he took too long to do it. Yes, he was dumb to release a product, Beacon, without thinking through the potential privacy implications. Yes, it was a big black eye for the Facebook founder.
But good for him.
While some are arguing that no one but the press and privacy advocates cared about the whole controversy around the ad system that can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed, it was only bound to get uglier out there.
So Zuckerberg, as he had before on news feeds, correctly calculated that it was time to eat crow. “I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better,” he wrote in a blog post today on the topic.
We knew that was coming, didn’t we?
Indeed, there was no benefit in staying stubborn about the feature that might not even be the be-all-and-end-all ad solution the social-networking site needs.
Reaction, of course, is mixed, as to the extent of the apology, the change and its impact.
On one hand, Om Malik of GigaOm, who is calling it Beacon Gate, noted: “I think this is a good move by Zuckerberg and I hope his team learns from it. This is the second time they have tried to test the limits of their community and gotten some flack for it. It would be better if they asked–they are a social community–and being social means listening and talking with each other first, not after the fact.”
On the other, Dave McClure of Master of 500 Hats defends Facebook: “The fact of the matter: Most of this sh– just doesn’t matter to most FB users. It might be a PR screw-up, but as long as the user base doesn’t have a negative reaction, eventually the advertisers won’t give a damn.”
We’ll see about that, of course, because this kind of thing can turn into death by a thousand cuts for a company, if they are not careful and don’t put the right kind of leadership in place with enough judgment to avoid this kind of mess.
More on that–the most critical issue going forward for Facebook–in this space soon.
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Comments
(nice parker brothers graphic… i appreciate you going the extra mile for those little extra touches
i tend to agree with you they could have managed this better, and probably should have been faster on the response.
and as Om points out, there might still be a technical / legal issue for them to deal with around transmitting user info appropriately.
but when all is said & done, the larger issue for facebook is still going to be monetization, not privacy.
they can always dial up or down the privacy settings on Beacon, and eventually arrive at something that satisfies the user community & their advertisers (if not always the press).
but it’s not going to be as easy to dial up the inventory of Feed stories from external sites if the Beacon settings are now truly opt-in (kind of).
whether or not any of this has an impact on monetization remains to be seen, but i gotta think they’ve got a lot more to figure out in that category.
Posted by dave mcclure at December 5th, 2007 at 8:41 pmOh, yes, the money.
We can’t all live on Microsoft money alone!
Well, we can. But that would be wrong.
Posted by Kara Swisher at December 6th, 2007 at 1:16 am