| I'm still surprised to discover how many of my friends and acquaintances have a negative view of facebook. Many of them are not very critical of things (and care little about their privacy, for example). The sentiment is generally something like 'I use facebook because it is too inconvenient not to, but I don't like it', which is a far cry from the initial 'facebook is this cool new thing that I wish more of my friends would use instead of <insert usually shitty local social network>'. In that light it makes sense for facebook to acquire up-and-coming business that compete with them, directly or indirectly, and I imagine there are quite a few people at the company who worry about this situation. And in that light it is especially strange for facebook to release a study like this. What did they think would happen? There have been quite a few instances over the past months (or years) that really made me wonder whether facebook's biggest problem, as a company, is that they're stuck in a bubble. A newsfeed that seems to be made for specific types of users, privacy kerfuffles, apps that don't seem to take off, and so on. 'Dogfooding' is generally a smart approach, but it doesn't seem like the optimal approach when your product relies on the whole world for its success... |