facebook keeps calling our bluff

You won't quit Facebook.

You never do. None of us seem to, not in any sort of great numbers, anyway. Facebook users revolt, over and over again. The latest revolt has attracted the attention of US Federal Trade Commission, and Facebook is doing what they always do - making a token gesture of listening to the users, in this case an "all-hands" meeting about privacy.

In the past Facebook has relented on some points of controversy, like Beacon and the 2009 revision of user terms and conditions, but those have been minor setbacks on their inexorable march towards more sharing of user data. Why should Facebook change their tune? No Facebook user revolt has ever resulted in a serious drop in traffic or unique users. If we don't put our money where our collective mouth is then Zuckerberg and Co. have no reason to take us seriously.

Look at Comscore's most recent traffic estimates for Facebook. I'm not a statistician but that doesn't look like an exodus of angry users to me.

So if you haven't quit, you're in good company. I haven't quit, either. I often want to, but as a marketer I'm paranoid that I would be insufficiently in the loop if I deleted my profile. Cowardly, but there it is.

Part of the reason has to be that we've grown to accustomed to having a social network that's pre-loaded with everybody you know. Facebook is basically a utility at this point. I'm legitimately surprised when I meet people these days who don't have Facebook profiles. The best thing Facebook has on its side is inertia.

But the social network exodus has happened before. Look at the Quantcast traffic estimates for MySpace as its user base was cannibalized by Facebook in 2007. The graph falls right off a cliff.

Killing the 800-pound gorilla of the Web is tough, but it's perfectly possible. As Ryan Singer said on Wired's Epicenter last week, it's time for an open alternative to Facebook. Maybe it'll be Diaspora, the "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" currently being built by four students in an NYU basement (they could use a little money, by the way).

Facebook won't stop pushing on privacy until we give them a reason to. So let's quit. You first.

Comments

[Timwhitlock]

I've got my fingers crossed for Diaspora, but it'll be a hell of job to persuade 500 million non-geeks to migrate

[Fernando Rizo]

Especially when you see articles like "Saudi Arabia Leads the Middle East With High (Facebook) Growth in March". They'll be like "Hey we just got here!"

Like many Internet migrations, it'll take geeks to make the first jump, then the non-geeks may follow. Twitter was wall-to-wall geeks in 2007, now the biggest user is Ashton Kutcher for god's sake.