Saturday, October 1, 2011

Facebook customers

I had watched with fascination the boldness with which facebook changes privacy settings and introduces new features. When it introduced features like location services, facial recognition, etc strangely the features came as enabled and the user, if needed had to find out from elsewhere that such a feature has been added and explicitly disable.

I tried to put myself in the place of the person who makes such decisions and think what will be the decision I would have taken,  I would have never even considered the option of rolling out new features without the consent from the customer. Obviously I would have taken the traditional route of having the feature disabled and trying to run a campaign to 'educate' the user to opt in. I would have considered that to be the rational option and I am sure I wouldn't have the guts of facing the wrath of the customers and the consequences of it.  For that matter I 'admire' facebook's and its 'arrogance'. In facebook's case, strangely most users ironically keep on making posts complaining about it and stay on, except for a few like N, who quit ( on a different note thank fully he deleted the "mud glorious mud" album! ;) )

After a few days of thinking something important dawned on me, I would have never done that to a CUSTOMER, but then who said that users are facebooks customers?! Dude, we are the products of facebook and as a business analyst I would have obviously made changes to the product without asking the product. My dear fellow products please understand the Economics of it and learn to live with it or just quit ;)

2 comments:

  1. Mud is still there. Only have to re activate my account!!

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  2. ahh seems like I jumped the gun to celebrate ;)

    ReplyDelete