Here at Twitalbums.com we believe it should be VERY easy for people to be “private” on the Internet. We believe “private” should be the default for every service that deals with personal information.

We built TA with this in mind.

Let us take Facebook for example which recently changed their privacy defaults settings, making every account (basically) public, including Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg

The core promise of Facebook since the early days was that by default it was set to private. People seemed to love the idea of their data being protected behind a close garden.

Those that did not care or simply had a taste for public exposure had an option.

This leads us to ask: why the sudden change? What can possibly be going on at Facebook that they are now pushing their users to have “public” accounts?

Start thinking: “eyeballs” and you can come to the conclusion that… is all about money.

Facebook massive growth has lead to VERY large amounts of page views that of course create an incredible inventory of ad slots.

In case you can’t see the chart: that’s approximately 135,000,000 visits a month.

Facebook is making a lot of cash (around 550 million a year) with ad-revenue, however, this might change in the near future and is probably the reason why Facebook wants you to have more friends.

Virtual Goods. Pay with Facebook:
Believe it or not, the virtual goods market will get close to 1.6 Billion dollars next year and Facebook is in an incredible position to have a big piece of that pie.

Let’s do some basic numbers:

• Total Facebook active users/month (that play FarmVille): 75.000.000
• % users that buy virtual goods: 10
• Total users that buy virtual goods: 7.5 million

Let’s consider that the average revenue per user per month is $2.8 That’s a 250 million industry (with one game) right there. Which is what Zynga did last year. Facebook plans to take 30% of that: 75 million a year.

No wonder companies like Zynga are more than happy to pay Facebook.

I’m guessing for that kind of money, investors will make you reconsider your core promise and focus on revenue. But back to privacy.

Powerful privacy options = Less privacy
Some might believe that Facebook is giving its users more privacy control by allowing them to be granular with their options. Well, it depends.

A “power user” might “invest” some time in reviewing every option Facebook has given them to control how his/her account behaves. However, I have a hard time believing this is the norm.

I’m more inclined to think about the 30 to 40 years old, with one or two children, that barely has some “Facebook time” that all of the sudden all of his/her babies pictures are now “public” by default. I’m guessing a “WTF?” is to be expected.

Specially when you go to change Facebook’s options:

First screen:

Lets asssume we want to change settings about our profile information:

This is CLEARLY created to make it cumbersome for the average user to change.

Our take on privacy
We believe this sort of things should be simple. This is why our options page looks like this:

That is it. 3 options.

And of course if someone is not invited, you can rest assure they won’t be able to see your personal media. They will get this instead:

Granted, Twitalbums has less numerous functionalities than Facebook. So, to level the playing field, let’s take a look at the photos options in Facebook:

Still seems like a lot to us.

Please tell us what you think in the comments

{ 5 comments }