The arbitrary and fuzzy policies of Facebook are having detrimental results on the ability of people to organize ad hoc campaigns against corporations.

“Grass-roots activists organizing boycotts against large corporations like Target stores and BP now find themselves directing some of their ire at another corporate monolith: Facebook. The boycotters turned to the popular social media site to spread word about their pressure campaigns and keep participants up to date on the latest developments, but those efforts became much more difficult last week when Facebook disabled key features on the boycott pages.”

Recommendation:

• Use Facebook cautiously.
• Make sure to check your privacy settings periodically; Facebook tends to creep on people’s privacy. Here is a recent interview of Mark Zuckerberg, and read between the line of what Mark means by wanting to increase openness.
• Create a separate page for your business, and invite your customers and associates there, rather than friending everyone to your personal page.
• Be wary of broadcasting private information on Facebook, and especially don’t broadcast other people’s private information without their permission. For example, the new location tagging might be cool, but get people’s permission before you tag them, because such information can be used by stalkers.

Social media is new, but progressing like email, which has more than 30 years history. The first model for email was the monolithic model, users leaving messages for other users on a mainframe. People were restricted in their choice of computers and programs to use, and censorship could be easily implemented by the administrators. Then the Internet arrived, with its distributed model, and freed people to express and organize however they want. Social media with Facebook is like email on mainframe computers years ago. But social media is heading towards that distributed model, and here are some open source projects leading the way: Appleseed, Diaspora, elgg.

Let’s touch on two similar terms that people might be confused on: open source software and “increased openness” that Zuckerberg refers to in the interview.

Open source software refers to computer software and letting others read and modify the source code (think of recipe or computer instructions) for their own needs, as opposed to closed source software, where the source code is not readily available. Most of the Internet is run on open source software, with technologies such as Linux or BSD (operating systems), Apache (web server), PHP (programming language), MySQL (database server), OpenSSH / OpenSSL (encryption), etc. Many behind open source software are also advocates of strong advocates of privacy and security.

The “increased openness” that Zuckerberg refers to has to do with information about people’s lives, and what most people refer to as privacy. One could say Facebook capitalizes on opening up people’s private information, and this creates a tension with people’s real needs to retain some anonymity, even as they open up to others. However, information on Facebook also gets censored in favor of corporations, as this article opened with, and so it begs the question what kind of “increased openness” does Zuckerberg refer to?

Shortly in the next few years, we’re going to see other competitors to Facebook come on the scene with their own interpretation of how to capitalize on this tension between “increased openness” and privacy. My prediction is that Facebook will become like the IBM (mainframes) of the new social media ecosystem, which will be soon be led by a cooperative of smaller and more nimbler companies, much like like Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc. transformed the computing industry. There are many programmers right now who are tinkering away in their living rooms, much like Jobs, Woz, Gates, Allen tinkered away in their garage, and I predict the ones to succeed are most likely going to be open source their software like Appleseed, Diaspora, Elgg, or some other project.