What happened to "Calm Down, Breathe. We hear you."? I'm not sure. Due to the fact that I'm in the business of creating things online, and due to the fact that I spend most of my life engaging with the internet, and have spent the majority of my career pushing towards an open source, and therefore open door approach I felt like I needed to comment on facebook's quietly implemented new privacy terms.

 

At one point Mark Zuckerberg may have cared about community, but I think Venturebeat's article says it best, I'd like to hear it from Mark himself.

 

A lot of companies in the internet space make mistakes- well, a lot of companies in general make mistakes. The thing that companies forget is that it's the people that make the company, not the company that makes the people. It's what facebook seems to be forgetting as they grow. We are facebook. facebook is a place where our social networks gather. It's a park we go to. They may own the place we hang out, but we own the relationships, and we can take those friends and hang out somewhere else.

 

facebook called a meeting at 4pm today to discuss the changes, because people are leaving in droves. What is facebook's policy on our privacy? I'd like to know. I think social networking sites owe it to us, they're borrowing our information to sell advertising, so I'd like to know how we're being protected. Their new policies would allow anyone to see what movies you like, what you like to do, where you like to go depending on what you "like" in your profile. Whether they are in your social network or not. It will be interesting to see where Zuckerberg chooses to take this, if he indeed understands the online gathering place he's built, he'll recover from this, like he did last round and we'll stay. Mark knows how the internet community works, when we don't like something, we say something. Let's see if he listens.

 

CNN.com Article