There is a story in African folklore about how to catch a Baboon. You make a tunnel in a termite mound, such that a Baboon can just get its hand down. You carve a slightly larger chamber at the end of it, just big enough for the Baboon to make a fist. You then roll seeds down the tunnel into the chamber. The Baboon reaches down, grabs the seeds in its fist, but can't then remove the balled fist with seeds in because the tunnel is too narrow. You then approach said Baboon with a knobkerrie (a club), and the Baboon, instead of just letting go of the seeds, withdrawing its hand and running off, greedily hangs on to its "gain" and thus can't get its hand out and gets knocked on the head - a life-terminating experience.
True or not, the story is told in Africa as a metaphor for holding onto one short term thing but getting clonked by a far bigger long term thing.
Facebook, in its desperation to hang on to the "100-year revolution" (and $15bn valuation) that is Beacon, runs the risk of being in this mindset. As we noted a few days ago, a
tipping point in opinion was measurably reached, and they clearly have
had to climb down from the original premise to avoid PR disaster and user desertion (and
save their bacon) for now.
However, the climbdown is as small as Facebook think they can get away with. Ars Technica has a good run of the
changes to the changes in real time (update - and covered even better in NYT Bits
here)
In essence, instead of having a flash-in-the pan pop-down popup that you have to catch and fill in to not spam your friends, you now have a slightly more persistent popup that you have to fill in to spam your friends. If you don't, it hangs around and adds friction to your experience until you fill it in. The problem with this is that its fine for the single case, but a pain in the **rse to do for every purchase from every retailer.
Not only that, but - as we understand it - even if you sign up once and never go near Facebook again in your life, your PC carries on "phoning home" every time you buy something, so you add to Facebooks' database of user behaviour unless you stop it doing so every time.
Also, if you look at how the opt-out is structured, it is very clearly designed to make opting into Beacon easy, and opting out less so. It is almost as if they were designed for people to just go for the simple option and opt in, to make the irritation go away - like those mobile phone buttons that are cleverly positioned launch the web browser when your fingers slip.
In other words, the Facefist is still tightly gripped around the seeds of user purchase data.
The risk is that the large club of User Disenchantment looms ever closer, as this is adding friction to the user experience, and users are not that dumb....but this interview with one of the Facebook guys shows they are still not really "getting" what they are being told! Brad Stone of the NYT
talked to Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations at Facebook - here are some transcripts:
Q. Why not give people a universal opt-out of the Beacon service?
A. “We think the right way to offer this is on a site-by-site basis. We want people to see how the product behaves on different sites.”
Words fail us......this is just such blatant dissembling I initially thought they were taking the p*ss...but no:
Q. But some people are asking for a single opt-out.
A. “One of the things we try to do is listen to feedback as much as possible. Just to give you where a lot of this feedback is coming from, it’s coming more from the press than specific users,” he said. “Right now, the right thing to do is to make sure we speak to actual users, not the pundits.”
Thats 50,000 "pundits" and counting...which is not as small as you may think - in any SocNet only a few % are really active, so 50,000 is probably a far larger % of "active" Facebookers than the .1% of its 50 million user base would suggest - and we suspect there is a bigger silent majority emerging as this stuff hits home.
And we all know this is not what Users want - every time opinion is tested, Users want easy and convenient control of their privacy* . The test of whether users will go with Facebook here is very simple. Do you feel OK with Beacon, even now?. If not, what are you going to do about it? We suspect the answer to the former is ummm, No and the answer to the latter is a slow drift away.
The big risk for Facebook is thus not the the banging by these noisy revolting users, but the whimper as the silent majority desert Facebook and move elsewhere.
The reason this whole episode is so interesting to us is not about Facebook per se (though they are an iconic arrogant outfit and great fun to watch) by the way, its that it is a real-time negotiation for the limits of privacy in the next phase of the internet - and as Howard Lindzon noted, Facebook's need to monetize rapidly is forcing the debate along at quite a clip, and in full public gaze.
The line up in the debate is also crystallizing - Online Marketeers, Social Net owners, staked VC's and a small set of (dependent?) Bloggers are promoting it and pooh-poohing the doubters, while noisy users, most independent Social Media experts, an increasing list of Regulatory agencies and a large contingent of bolshie bloggers are against it.
Our take - at the end of the day, if the user doesn't like it they will walk away - and they don't, and they will. The wisdom of the crowds will call this one. Our bet is that Facebook will be on mass auto opt-out be end December.
3-2 Odds again - any takers?
* Even a certain Social Network founder
doesn't like his privacy
being exposed!
