Fruhling im Berlin, and the budding privacy backlash

Today I was in Berlin for the first time since the September 2008 O'Reilly Web 2.0 Congress, and it was interesting to reflect on the changes. That was the Autumn, both in Berlin and for the Web 2.0 movement. I went there in 2008 to give my paper on why Freeconomics would fail, and predicted that the next few years would see a rape of customer data the like of which had not been imagined before, as the venture backed funding (which some pundits mistook for sustainable revenue) dried up.

(This was my Berlin paper for the record)

That rape has come to pass, with social networking sites like Facebook, search engines such as Google, and various other players playing fast a nd loose with user data.

However, as I went down Unter Den Linden yesterday, in the clear air of the Berlin spring, with the new leaves shining against the sun, I reflected that there has been a spring of sorts in the sorry saga of Web 2.0 as well - in that the backlash against the datamining and privacy abuse that I warned of in 2008 is well and truly underway (this chart from teh New York Times on the Saga of Facebook privacy control avoidance is excellent).

Incidentally, I see a post doing the rounds saying that Facebook is due to announce 500 million users (up from c 250million a year before) and that all this hoo-hah about privacy is overblown. I think this misunderstands the issue - as I pointed out last week, this is the beginning of the end, not at the end. What we are seeing now is akin to the dotcom market a year before it tanked - the smart money is bailing out while the suckers are pouring in. I drew the diagram above some years ago to explain this fairly common phenomenon in social nets.

Facebook is cranking up for its IPO, and doing everything which it has to do before the wheels fall off (and they will - it is the way of all social nets). In this it follows the time honoured tradition of all the previous social nets (well, any dotcom IPO really) of pumping before dumping. In order to do this, it has to be, ahem - optimistic - on its growth figures, so how many of those 500 million are real bona fide users would be an interesting question. The comments page to the original Facebook article on All Facebook above is quite sceptical, which given that blog is a Fanboi one is telling in itself

Caveat Emptor, as they say.....