How To Split An Atom

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Everyone hates Facebook. Until this morning I counted myself among the rank and file netizen who thought that the social networking site had finally gone too far.

They made the error of passing over that narrow gap between cute profile site and Telco-esque data brokering. In the blogosphere, you pay for that sort of blunder.

Why have I changed my mind? Not much more than two days after the firestorm started, Facebook has reacted, sending out a public statement of contrition.

Lets face it, the web moves quickly and young companies are always looking for that edge. Facebook attempted to innovate, but ended up alienating its audience. Mark Zuckerberg could have easily ignored the problem and hoped everyone just cooled down, but instead he took the bull by the horns and accommodated his customers.

This kind of flexibility is something that would have been unheard of only a decade ago, and for that he has, at least, earned my forgiveness. Now, go change your privacy settings and learn to forgive.

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. 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.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

[Picture of Mr. Zukerberg from his Facebook profile]