There have been plenty of “10 Trends For 2010″ posts on every conceivable topic. And for good reason. We all love top lists. Besides, they’re great link baits. And everybody wants to know the future. But 2010? Isn’t that a bit weak? Mine goes to 11!
Zuckerberg is Right – Privacy is Dead
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was recently criticized for saying that the age of privacy is over, and that if he’d done Facebook over again today, the default mode would have been public, not private. In my mind, Zuckerberg is absolutely right. The social web is not new to humanity, rather it’s an expansion in volume of a behavior that we already had, and that has evolved over thousands of years for good reason. Social exchange (liberal exchange that is, not socialistic) is simply beneficial for the individuals involved and will make it easier to survive and thrive.
Facebook, however was started fairly early in this expansion (though very recently historically of course), and therefore people hadn’t begun to see the benefits of sharing their information with others on this scale yet. Now however, many of us still keep Facebook as a more private sphere than, say, Twitter merely out of habit. There is a lot of potential here. Why wouldn’t I let anybody who wants to friend me on Facebook do so? I block very few people on Twitter, right?
Perhaps not this year, but in 2011 we’ll see very few friend requests being denied. Abuse of these “friend” relationships will lead to expulsion just like you would block somebody on Twitter for the same reason, and for that reason there is no need for privacy panic.
The age of Facebook privacy is over by the end of 2011.
Perhaps Facebook will even just be a very awesome front end to all other services with top filtering ideas from services like Fever and Twingly Channels incorporated. Who knows.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The big change according to me is that privacy has gone mass mediated. It means we’ll have to think about what is okey that others gets to know about us and what’s not okey. And I think we will re-evaluate that too and see that we keep a lot of things private without any real reason to do so.
On the other hand there are things we really do want to keep private. Best advice is to not publish it in your network and make sure you don’t talk about those things with your friends unless you know they won’t tell anyone else or publish it in their networks.
Facebook is gone 2011. All the fun was over 2008. It´s only the same people who loves myspace that still uses facebook. And the most funny part is that FB still counts all the accounts that no one uses. No accounts is deleted! So all spammers and everybody how has left facebook are still counted.