Facebook screwed up with Beacon, and, intitially, they didn’t handle the screwup very well. Mark Zuckerberg published a very necessary apology today, but his apology can’t address the larger problem: it’s hard to run a community system for big profit. Attempts to monetize community systems are too readily seen as exploitation by community members. Zuckerberg and his colleagues were insensitive to this concern, which crops up from time to time. In the nineties, when I was part of Howard Rheingold’s startup community system, Electric Minds, we heard concerns about “commoditization of community.”
Who owns Facebook, Zuckerberg and his investors? Or the community of users without which Facebook would be little more than a vaporous cloud? If the former, what rights to they have with regard to their users’ data?
