John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, once stated that, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about the death of privacy, one has to wonder whether Barlow’s statement may be more relevant to the times if phrased: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking Facebook to respect the private information of its users.”
While there are plenty of smart people arguing the pros and cons of the effects of Facebook’s new privacy changes and Google Buzz’s auto-following model on users’ private information online, I am more interested in the business implications of these developments. The industry powers like Facebook and Google seem to be in a mad dash to make more information public; however, I wonder if this push for extended network connectivity is smart for all networks.
A recent study conducted by Nielsen found that Twitter’s “heavy users” in the UK consist of 7% of the user population and make up 79% of the total amount of time spent on the site. Facebook on the other hand sees in the UK 52% of its population as “heavy users” making up 98% of the time spent on site. While this distinction between the distributions of user activity on the two sites could be attributed to a number of things (e.g. type of content hosted, product differences, etc.), I personally believe that the network designs with regards to privacy and the nature of users information have the largest effect on the user activity distributions.
When analyzing the value of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, much of the excitement comes from data that shows digital word-of-mouth as the most trusted marketing form. Taking this into consideration, you would think that Facebook and Twitter would want to be very deliberate in making adjustments to privacy settings and product design that effects how information is shared throughout their networks, with a focus on optimizing the distribution of user activity in a way that would best support their business models.
The two networks are typically used for very different things – I think of Facebook as my “social life identity” and Twitter as my “broadcast identity“. Inevitably, Twitter is a much more public platform than Facebook which would suggest the distribution of user activity will always be a bit more skewed. However, I think it is safe to assume those over at Twitter are probably thinking of ways to engage a larger portion of their user base. From Facebook’s standpoint, I find the sneaky move to make user’s information more public by default is certainly questionable in terms of user trust, but also strange from a business standpoint. Facebook’s biggest strength is how deeply people engage with on another on the site, by making such a change I feel they could be jeopardizing this.
I am interested to hear what others thing about this – do you think it is smart for Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz all to be pushing consumers to share more information publicly? Do you think it is smart for one and not the others? Let me know in the comments.
I am also interested in hearing from any of you statistical nerds about what you think ideal user activity distributions would look like for the different networks. I’ll write a follow up post with my opinions on this if there is any activity around the idea.
Tags: business, customer, social networks, social web, strategy