There’s an article today on MSNBC, indicating that according to a poll, people generally don’t trust Facebook. The reasons the article comes up with are interesting, but it left me wondering if there’s not something a bit simpler going on in the minds of people who are focusing on the social networking site. Let me put it into my theory:
1. People don’t trust a company that continues to chip away at something it claims it’s not trying to do, and by that, I’m referring to compromising privacy. Since day one, Facebook has been trying to gain more and more information about people and then use that information for its own personal profit. When called on it, they back down, a bit, and then turn around and try another attempt at circumventing their own rules, while pretending that’s not what they’re doing. It’s like a romantic partner who claims never to cheat, and you keep finding him/her with someone from the opposite sex, and once confronted, he/she claims it will never happen again. And then next week, it does. That’s the main problem with trusting Facebook. It’s almost as if they feel they’re too big to be held responsible for their actions. And when confronted, they really don’t care.
2. People don’t trust a company created by young people who galavant around as rich, privileged asses. Since Zuckerberg became the new billionaire on the block, people generally don’t like him. The corporate world doesn’t like him because he shows up at fancy meetings in a hoodie. The common people don’t like him because he’s that geek kid that screwed you over in secret and then tried to pretend it was someone else. Girls don’t like him because he’s a womanizing prick who wouldn’t ever get a girl if he didn’t also happen to be a billionaire. Face it. Every social situation that appears around him displays him as an ass. Sure, he could be the greatest, nicest guy around, but the movie about him makes him look like a backstabbing smart kid who even screwed over his own best friend for money. It’s hard to trust someone like that, even if the movie was completely false and it turns out he’s nicer than Mother Teresa.
3. Facebook doesn’t actually do anything to generate an actual profit. You see, that’s the thing that’s been bothering me since day one. It’s a social networking site where THE MEMBERS are the ones actually doing all of the socializing. Facebook is like the road you drive on to get somewhere. It isn’t cool. It doesn’t make your trip more enjoyable. It’s just there to get you from one place to the next. Yet, it’s like the road then sending you a message indicating that it’s now going to take all of your vital information and sell it to all of your friends (and then charge you for it) because you decided to actually drive on the road to get to work once. The analogy is a bit strained, but I’m sure you get the idea.
I have a few friends of mine who gave up Facebook when it first started to become big. They haven’t looked back since. Sure, it’s harder to keep in touch with them, but I don’t get the impression that they’re hurting for their decision. They didn’t trust Facebook since day one, and as a result they gave it up. To be honest, I may end up doing the same thing myself because it hasn’t proved to be all that useful to me over the long haul. My writing business hasn’t improved, and when I go onto Facebook, all I see is the same kind of messages I used to see before, except now it seems like Facebook has changed its algorithms again so that not everything is showing up as it should. And recently they announced that they want to charge people in order to make their updates appear. To me, that’s bordering on final straw territory. So, I may disappear soon, but not because of anger or anything, but because like the majority of the people in that poll: I don’t trust Facebook.
But worse, rather than just not trust Facebook, I’m starting to realize I may not even want Facebook. It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose for me if it wants to monetize me rather than monetize stuff I do and give me a cut of the profits. I work for a company that monetizes me as part of its agreement to pay me a salary. Facebook doesn’t do that. It expects the activity for free and then wants to profit even more off of it.
Which brings me to the soon to come public release of Facebook on Nasdaq. The owners of Facebook are trying to push that phantom value even higher and profit even more. But secretly, I suspect that there’s really no value in a paper tiger that doesn’t actually do anything other than rely on its constituents to fill in the active feeds. Without the people, Facebook is just another web site, like Myspace and someone useless like a Netscape browser. Talk about bubbles. This seems like the most ridiculous helium bubble we’ve ever manufactured, and when it bursts, I hate to be covered with the Myspace residue that is going to explode over everyone.