Facebook.

Well the people over at Facebook really screwed up the other day. By introducing the news/mini feeds without any privacy restrictions whatsoever, they managed to infuriate most of their very loyal base of users. Fair enough, everyone makes mistakes. But what Facebook should really be criticized for is their terrible response to this crisis (and trust me, for them it was a crisis).

At first they defended these changes as seen in e-mails and Mark Zuckerberg's September 6 blog entry. Their initial attitude was "trust us, you'll learn to like it." This pissed us users off even more because I don't need a college dropout (a very wealthy one at that) without any apparent critical thinking skills telling me in a patronizing tone that "I'll learn to like it."

They used the logic that well all this information is available to your Facebook friends, why should you care if it is highlighted when people log-in or view your page. That's beyond poor logic. It shows a real lacking in critical thinking skills. Well, yes, people can view your page to see these changes, but we sure don't want some of these changes (relationship status, who wrote on whose wall, who is my new friend, etc) broadcasted because it's creepy. Plus I don't really care to know which one of my friends wrote on someone else's wall. It was just too much.

And there was no way to turn it off other than manually removing the feeds, which was a real pain. About 750,000 Facebook users (out of 8 million or so) joined the biggest protest group against these changes. Major media picked up the story with the first big publication being Time Magazine posting a story on their website, linked from CNN.com (the second most visited news site on the internet). Yesterday it made the front page of the Washington Post and the front of the second section of the Wall Street Journal. This was terrible press for Facebook and as far as we knew they were standing firm, despite millions of enraged users.

Finally, this morning they introduced privacy settings that controls what information of yours goes on the news/mini feeds. I understand it takes time to code these changes, but they should have a) told us that they were in the process of doing this to calm everyone down and b) reverted to the old version of Facebook until they could make these changes.

Instead, they defended their changes until the bitter end destroying the huge reservoir of goodwill they had created. Mark Zuckerberg went from saint to devil overnight. His personal information (phone, e-mail, etc.) as well as other members of the Facebook corporation were posted all over the internet. They managed to create an incredible amount of negative press. Our generation, the generation who doesn't care to protest anything, finally found a cause to rally around. College students, who scoffed when adults warned us about our lack of internet privacy, all of a sudden were crying foul about lack of privacy. All because Facebook mismanaged the entire situation.

Well now we have better privacy options. That's a good thing. Mark Zuckerberg also posted an open letter apologizing for what they did that starts with "We really messed this one up." Yea, Mark, you really did. It's nice that you finally show some humility after two and a half days of being a pompous asshole on the issue.

Who knows how much market value Facebook has lost this week? Who know how much damage they really caused? At least they know their users really care about their site. It's the seventh most visited site on the internet. The average user logs in daily and spends 16-18 minutes on the site. That's amazing. I personally do not like the format of our Facebook pages with the new layout due to the mini-feed. But hopefully, they'll change it so it looks a bit better.

Well Facebook and Mark, I accept your apology. Do me a favor though next time. Don't be so stupid. If you screw up, admit it and say you'll fix it, don't defend it until the last minute and then change your position. You have a good thing worth a ton of money; do not forsake it.