Understanding your customers desires and CGN rocking the free world
Yesterday, I had dim sum with a good friend from Stanford who works for Facebook. We were talking about firestorm Facebook got for their new 'Beacon' (Honey, that jewelry and lingerie purchase you just made better be for me or you're dead meat) feature that more or less forced users to share their purchases with their friends unless they could figure out a complex opt-out screen. He more or less said they forced the feature to be on by default because "otherwise nobody would use it".
That's quite possibly the worst possible reason to force a feature on people. Perhaps this is taken a bit out of context, but its still inexcusable to have that attitudes on a number of different levels. Windows had a feature called 'Windows Media Player' that they turned on by default and they got sued by the European Union for it. Even if you can slap your customers around and they still won't leave you doesn't mean you should.
Any business should know that they need to mix what is best for them and what is best for their customers in their product. The cliche "the customer is always right" should apply to the internet as well. Even if you make a feature that can be easily monetized, you have to still weight the costs and benefits of it. Websites have privacy policies not because its best for them, but because its best for their customers. Selling customer data would be much more profitable, but clearly not in the customers' interest.
The problem here may be that Facebook's customers are different from their users. Their customers pay them to display adds and their users post content and click on advertisers links.
There is something to be said for beta testing and customer discovery instead of the web-based ship new code and feature every night. Facebook does quite a few things right, but they prove, a little bit of testing goes a long way. Everyone makes mistakes every once in a while.
The one and only Code Green Networks is the number one of Five data leak prevention companies to watch. 2008 should be a good year for the DLP space. 2007 had 3 big acquisitions and we'll probably see a few more in the next year.
That's quite possibly the worst possible reason to force a feature on people. Perhaps this is taken a bit out of context, but its still inexcusable to have that attitudes on a number of different levels. Windows had a feature called 'Windows Media Player' that they turned on by default and they got sued by the European Union for it. Even if you can slap your customers around and they still won't leave you doesn't mean you should.
Any business should know that they need to mix what is best for them and what is best for their customers in their product. The cliche "the customer is always right" should apply to the internet as well. Even if you make a feature that can be easily monetized, you have to still weight the costs and benefits of it. Websites have privacy policies not because its best for them, but because its best for their customers. Selling customer data would be much more profitable, but clearly not in the customers' interest.
The problem here may be that Facebook's customers are different from their users. Their customers pay them to display adds and their users post content and click on advertisers links.
There is something to be said for beta testing and customer discovery instead of the web-based ship new code and feature every night. Facebook does quite a few things right, but they prove, a little bit of testing goes a long way. Everyone makes mistakes every once in a while.
The one and only Code Green Networks is the number one of Five data leak prevention companies to watch. 2008 should be a good year for the DLP space. 2007 had 3 big acquisitions and we'll probably see a few more in the next year.
posted by beatdodgers at
10:41 PM
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