Sarah Lacy posted on TechCrunch about the Facebook Terms of Service debacle. You know, the one where Facebook (again) made major changes (again) without properly considering their users (again) or vetting the changes in front of the user base (again).
I asked Kelly—on this, the third major user uproar the company has faced on privacy that caught it completely by surprise—if the issue was a blind spot for the company or if Facebook was doing something so new in organizing the data of human relationships that it was bound to take all the arrows as these issues of privacy continually emerge. Kelly essentially said its the latter; I think it’s a mixture of both, although Facebook’s privacy sensitivities have clearly come a long way since the News Feed and Beacon debacle days. Give them credit: Each time they learn how to handle the crisis better, and this time they sprung into action quickly and decisively.
Setting aside the extreme slack that Lacy seems to give Facebook at every turn, my response is simple: no, I’m not going to “give them credit”. This is the third major breach. They’re clearly not maturing as an organization and they’ve not found a way to effectively communicate, or hell understand the sore spots their users have.
For an organization steeped in the Social Web, they apparently have very little understanding of it’s members.
