The Social Protocol For 12/10/09: Mark Zuckerberg Needs To Just Admit He Wants To Be Like Biz Stone

Basically, everyone is hating or not happy about Facebook's continued obsession for traffic by trying to be like Twitter instead of being the separate entity that it is suppose to be.

Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone."

This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It's not about privacy at all, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site.

And:

“The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently … Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.”

And this is even more alarming

“These could be the most important clicks you ever make on Facebook. If you don’t read carefully you could find that every post you make on Facebook, and your personal information, is visible to everyone in the world who has a computer rather than just your Facebook friends.

Let’s make this clear. If you make your information available to ‘everyone,’ it actually means ‘everyone, forever.’ Because even if you change your mind, it’s too late — and although Facebook say they will remove it from your profile they will have no control about how it is used outside of Facebook.”

The lack of transparency to its users is not a surprise for Facebook through. From the dramatic changes of its news feed to its rapid alterations of "The Wall" on everyone's profile, the site has basically never asked for "in put on whether to keep it or not", like Twitter with its Re-tweet option. Instead, Facebook give you the "You will like it or too bad for you" mentality by going with its changes no matter how unpopular they are.

"You'll like it once you get used to it" is their motto really nowadays. And now, this newest move maybe the bridge way too far for some folks (if the other stuff in the past weren't already).

Zuckerberg and his "obsessed money and domination" self will bypass the privacy of those who facilitated in making his site the behemoth it is. It's all about more revenue and garnering more traffic than his "competitors", which is utterly ridiculous.

Facebook, for the 5,600,000 time, should not be completing with Twitter. They are two completely different social protocols.

You would think that Facebook was desperate for money with the way they keep on needing to adapt themselves to have characteristics just like Twitter, and to somehow have as much content and information as Google.

All these changes may get to a point where Zuckerberg and company will make a decision that could really flush Facebook's popularity down the drain.

And the backlash on this latest unpopular move could be the seeds planted for that to happen.