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Mark Zuckerberg Just Put Facebook Into Maintenance Mode
The dawn of Facebook’s second act…
So, that Mark Zuckerberg Facebook privacy memo. What stood out to me when it was published was that it was one of the first non-faceplants (not to mention non-facepalms) Facebook had done from a PR-perspective in months. It’s actually pretty well-written, seemingly straight-forward, and unquestionably interesting.
Upon reflection, a week later, I believe there’s quite a bit more nuance in terms of what it means. Essentially, it means almost nothing in the short term, and almost everything in the long term.
What Zuckerberg signaled with the memo is simply an intent. He intends to steer the Facebook ship towards the private waters that they’ve largely shunned in the past. Instead, Facebook has operated almost solely in the public seas and enticed billions of users to join them there. But a rogue wave has rolled that party this year. And as those troubled waters have begun to recede, everyone is now seeing the very real downsides of living our lives and leaving our data exposed out in the open.
This is an existential threat to Facebook. But the network’s demise has been overstated in these times of trouble because of its sheer size and scope. Facebook is too big to fail — at least to fully flatline. Instead, it will decay over time. And this decay will largely happen as its foundation (new users from new generations) crumbles. This will take a lot of time.
And time is exactly what Facebook needs to pull off the pivot Zuckerberg is suggesting. Again, it’s not that he’s going to shut down Facebook, forsake ads, and make everything private, it’s that he intends to build products going forward that cater to this new world that has been left in old Facebook’s wake.
Said another way: he effectively just put Facebook as we know it into maintenance mode. It will continue to operate, and will undoubtedly ship new features here and there — at the very least to keep some level of freshness so that they can continue to milk the profits of the News Feed to feed the new initiatives. But make no mistake: there’s a new focus going forward.¹
Many people seem to think that such a read of the situation is giving Zuckerberg too much credit. That…
