Facebook keeps to its strategic knitting shock horror

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has published an Open Letter about changes in policy to make Facebook a more lovely, open and otherwise happy smiling place - by actually increasing privacy. Zuckerberg:

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Thats very interesting. Regional networks - in theory - are part of the whole "GeoLocation" current craze which is going to be one of The Next Things. Also, further limiting who sees what flies against their recent drive to open it up amd Twitterize it, which again is one of the Hot New Things.

Now there is a bit of stuff afterwards where they will be "recommending new privacy settings based on your needs" which may be a euphemism for "prizing open your data for the bots", but assuming its on the level, why turn one's back on the New New Ways?

Seems to me there are two very plausible reasons:

(i) There is not enough money in the current ecosystem to make it worth opening the data up (aka the Murdoch Realisatiion - Google makes money, but do you?) compared to the potential PR risks of being seen as a privacy thief.

(ii) The Facebook model is to make money out of datamining its user data and giving advertisers access to this - why share the love? Given that they have 350m users and growing, thats a huge private ecosystem

In other words, its a rational execution of the existing walled garden strategy - make it more of a paradise internally to recruit/retain people, but why open it up to others? It also sends a signal to where they believe value will lie in the "let it all hang out" debate - possibly because of their size - but I suspect they're right - most people want privacy, its only a noisy minority who like to let it all out, all over.