Facebook wants us to trust it. Zuckerberg says they need to change their hacker mentality. Stop taking advantage of users and start seeing our point of view. It’s not going to happen. And he isn’t putting his money where his mouth is. Facebook is still essentially the same scammy way of thinking he had from the day he ripped off the idea from others and rushed to do it first.
It is also about how businesses react to pressure. Google is a fine example. They do the philantthropy angle much more convincingly. They did from day one. Purple cow, Project X or anything else you want to call it, they made it part of their branding all along.
But there is more to it; the whole social network idea is simply not the right message. Don’t look at youngsters leaving Facebook. Look at Google starting to phase out the Google Plus logging from other sites. Why? Not because Google plus failed. Because a Google identity either from Gmail or from an Android phone is pretty ubiquitous. And serious. Nobody will blink if you tell them you have Gmail. Tell them you use Facebook and it takes a bit of explanation: what, how, when, why.
Social networking is not a core life activity. Communicating is. Facebook made it’s mission (along the way) sharing the things you care about with the world. Well, Facebook is not the best way of doing that, is it? Windows dressing, slogans and reacting to market research won’t save Facebook unless it really, really changes its actions before its words.
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