May 2010

So Facebook got a lot of criticism for their latest privacy changes and having privacy controls that are too ‘granular’, or whatever …

I guess there are two groups of Facebook users, those who don’t care about privacy so much, and those who are confused and fed up with all the changes. The first group is probably bigger, but still there must be a reasonable number of disgruntled users.

The basic problem is that Facebook has quite large costs (can you imagine how many servers are needed for 500m users?) and it has to cover these somehow, so it keeps coming up with fancy-pants advertising schemes, all of which leverage users’ data to some extent, and so come the privacy concerns and the outrage and the angst, etc.

Instead, why don’t they just charge a frigging fee. I’d happily pay $10 a year or so for a Facebook-like service with only two privacy settings: PRIVATE, where only my friends can see my stuff, and PUBLIC, where everyone can see my stuff.

Sure they might not get 500m users and they couldn’t monetise their social graph (whatever that means), but even 5m x $10 = $50m, not a tiny sum of money.