14 DAY TRIAL // Being the newest hottest coolest best?est social network on the Internet has brought Facebook its share of both good and bad things happening. The Good: it manages to swipe Google's employees off their feet and lure them to switch workplaces. The Bad: it helped a coalition of other social networking sites form with the specified purpose to dominate the market together rather than alone. The Ugly: being so new in the market it hasn't had time to go through the ropes with every single issue that happened to those before it so now it's target to quite a lot of hype and comments. For those who haven't seen the movie "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" I strongly recommend it, it's a must for the cowboy in you.
The ugly part started last week when a privacy issue was brought up for talking about by MoveOn.org, who filed a petition calling Facebook to provide privacy as the default setting with users presumably able to opt-in to data sharing. Facebook quickly replied in the most democratic fashion by censoring the MoveOn.org group and not showing it in any results run through its search engine.
Over the weekend the issue grew larger and larger and by that brought a question on many people's lips: why such a fuss about Facebook doing the "no-privacy" thing when Google for starters gives away cookies that monitor your web travel logs for 35 years. Well of course it's going to tell you that if you've got a problem with that you can always go ahead and switch to another search engine that provides essentially the same data, it's only natural. But Facebook isn't really in the position to be able to suggest that and others go "hey, I could just switch social networks? why haven't I ever thought of that?" because of the close connection between users? and it's not like if one user has a problem with it everybody in his friends list is going to switch.
And the issue comes down to nothing for those, many, I might add, who just don't care about their data and who couldn't care less about the way this is solved for the rest. To Facebook or not to Facebook? That is the latest question.