The Crisis of Facebook

Recently, the world’s most popular social networking website, Facebook, faced a small crisis in which a small proportion of users complained that their old private messages were made public. Facebook quickly denied this claim, stating that the messages listed on the users’ timelines were public to begin with.

So this leads to an argument, either Facebook did make an error and turned all private messages to public, or the users themselves did not believe they would have posted such messaged publicly on their friends’ walls years ago when people were less concerned about privacy.

The reason why Facebook became an enormously popular platform was the fact that they allowed users from all over the world to connect with each other through personal information. That was their point of difference. Facebook made money through advertisements that were tailored to this information.

However, now that more and more people are addressing the importance of privacy, people are less inclined to publish their information online. This in turn causes Facebook to lose a ton of profit, since providing advertisements to the users’ personal information was how they made money.

Although Facebook users are now less inclined to display their information publicly, they still love the network, which allowed many to reconnect with old friends. This was and still is their brand, to connect with friends. So now the question would be, what can Facebook do to gain profit while allowing users to share their information privately?

image: http://www.stolaf.edu/services/hr/facebook_logo.png

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