By K. A. Laity
After the fiasco surrounding the sudden change in Terms of Service for Facebook changes in terms which included:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
FB users demanded a retraction and joined oodles of FB groups to show their dissatisfaction, including, "People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)," "FACEBOOK OWNS YOU: Protest the New Changes to the TOS!" and "Those against Facebook's new TOS!"
There were threats by many users to abandon the service altogether, too, though many seemed to use their status updates to broadcast their intention as the hours went by.
Zuckerberg did learn from this conflict: he learned that he had a captive audience.
When it came time to introduce the latest revamp of FB, which sought to make it ape the constant stream of information like Twitter or FriendFeed, users again objected with bitter frustration -- for a second time, by using FB to complain in their status updates, to join groups protesting the "New Facebook" and even to declare a one-day boycott of the service.
In other words, they did nothing.
I don't know of a single person in my friend list who actually quit. Many joined various protest groups on FB to shake their fists impotently at the gods of software and who dutifully logged onto the feedback site to complain about the way things had changed.
Yet even the apparent revelation by the oh-so-trustworthy Gawker that FB employees themselves hated the redesign and that Zuckerberg himself thought, according to that source, "that companies were 'stupid' for 'listening to their customers,'" was not enough to get users to stop using the very service they complained about to vent.
So congratulations, Zuckerberg. You have a vast network of addicted people who will weather every inconvenience to continue to use the network. While having to see every single posting recording our pals' insistence on sending Hatchlings or on taking quizzes about what '80s pop star they are may have taxed our patience, we're so wholly dependent that we will continue to take what you dish out with only a nominal outcry.
God help us all.
[Image via Ivy Gate Blog]