Facebook's Plan for World Domination

The headline on this blog is a cliché, on purpose, and it echoes many of the headlines across tech media this week after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his latest-and-greatest plan for how Facebook is going to "transform the Web." A sampling:

"Will Facebook Be Our Overlord" – PC World

Facebook: Privacy Enemy Number One? – PC Mag

How Facebook's Newest Feature Could Change the Internet – The Atlantic

And so on. These "Holy s**t!" headlines, though, reflect confusion about Facebook really is, and what it is trying to become. Which is natural because Zuckerberg himself, and his team, are confused about what Facebook should be.

This disconnect was pointed out the day before Zuckerberg's keynote at Facebook's f8 conference by Mark Pincus, the CEO of online gaming company Zynga, when he said at an industry conference that "Facebook is at a crossroads." The social media giant, which now has more than 400 million users, needs to decide whether it wants to be a "social portal" – a place where people go to essentially kill time and hang out with friends and strangers – or "the plumber for the online world,” providing an essential platform for traversing many sites across the Web – news sites, photo-sharing sites, games, online TV sites, Amazon, & so on – and using online applications.

Zuckerberg envisions the latter, based on the new "Like" buttons that have already encrusted many sites like barnacles. When you click to show that you like this article, or game, or YouTube video, that information is stored not only in your Facebook profile, for sharing with friends, but throughout "the Facebook ecosystem," which includes content publishers and marketers looking to capitalize on it.

In other words, your habits and preferences and shady online interests will also be available to marketers who want to deliver customized ads. "Facebook's new policy doesn't make your private information public," wrote The Atlantic's Derek Thompson. "It makes your public information a lot more public."

This is Zuckerberg's "vision" for a semantic Web, tied together by a vast matrix of crosslinks, shared interests, tastes in common with others like you, crowd-sourced recommendations, all handled and transmitted, and broadcast, by Facebook. It's a privacy disaster waiting to happen. And it's already sparked outrage in Europe, where they are less enchanted with the idea that everything you post or read or view or find momentarily diverting on the Web should be public, monetizable property.

"For Google, having users share private information is a constant risk and an unfortunate side affect of its services, perhaps even a liability," wrote Dan Costa of PC Mag. "For Facebook, it is a business model."

It's also in direct conflict with a broader social trend, as individuals become more aware of the value of their personal data and more sophisticated about controlling it and, in some cases, trading it for things they want.

"I see the clouds of a civil war on the horizon between users and the platform vendors," Stuart Williams, an analyst with Technology Business Research, told Computer World, "as users want more discrete control over their history, privacy and data, and the platform vendors who drive advertising and data mining businesses."

Combining callowness and arrogance to a degree not seen since Bill Gates' own "world domination" phase, Zuckerberg is oblivious to this conflict; but Facebook users have already shouted down other invasive attempts at revenue-generation, and Web users in general tend to quickly reject anything that smacks of commercializing systems and applications they've already grown accustomed to using, and personalizing, for free. That includes rejecting intrusive ads and blatant marketing grabs.

Facebook, in other words, is not about to "conquer the Internet." It's trying to figure out a sustainable business model. And to the extent that model depends on grabbing and distributing users' personal data, without their express consent, it's a big risk.