aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Zuckerberg hoisted on his own pertard?

Remember the very thorough article by Luke O’Brien from 02138, an independent magazine aimed at Harvard alumni, that convinced me along with probably pretty much everyone who read it that Mark Zuckerberg is not telling the truth about the creation of Facebook?

There are some ugly stories in there that have the ring of truth to them. They are buttressed, no doubt, by the 02138 posting of a series of court documents in a downloadable format.

On Thursday Facebook unleashed a massive legal fury at 02138 after discovering that those documents included Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Security number, the full name of his girlfriend and the address of his parent’s house in New York.

The documents have been redacted and reposted. “It was a regrettable error and we have fixed it,” said 02138 executive editor Richard Bradley.

Kara Swisher’s been watching and commenting on the irony of Facebook’s privacy concerns, “given that Facebook is embroiled in a controversy over advertising practices it has unveiled recently that some think are violations of Facebook users’ privacy.”

A Massachusetts judge denied the Facebook take-down request. As questions about Zuckerberg mount:

[H]is company is under intense fire for new ad programs it recently introduced, especially one called Beacon, which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed.

While it made some changes in Beacon last week, Facebook has not given users a global opt-out of the controversial marketing system in which the social network is seeking to link behavior and advertising more tightly for supposedly bigger payoffs.

Of course, after more bad publicity, rising user ire and inevitable advertiser pull-out from the program (Coca-Cola has already headed for the hills, according to reports), it’s a good bet that Facebook will be forced into an opt-out for all solution.

But, I am guessing given what as to be simple stubbornness on the part of Zuckerberg, another few rounds of devastating publicity for Facebook.

Let’s just say that this is not a good thing for a company that recently got a $15 billion valuation after $300 million of investments by Microsoft and last week, as first reported by BoomTown here, Asian billionaire Li Ka-shing.

There is little question in my mind-and it has to be going through the minds of all Facebook employees and investors-that all this should be considered a major fumble on the part of 20-something CEO Zuckerberg, whose judgment on how to handle both Beacon and in waging the pointless lawsuit against 01238 seems deeply flawed at best.

More on that key issue for Facebook here in BoomTown next week.

It looks like I’ll be reading more of Kara in the coming days.

RELATED: Henry Blodget parses the NYTimes’ Louise Story who asked Zuckerberg about Beacon and found “a gap between what Facebook said and what it did.”

Blodgett says the Facebook spokesman’s attempts to explain what Zuckerberg really meant only made matters worse. “Time for Facebook to look in the mirror and realize that it’s not a quirky little start-up anymore.”

LATER: Fred Wilson sees it all as Backlash but quotes Umair’s more evil than evil post:

Like I’ve been pointing out - the real strategic problem is that Facebook is a faux revolutionary. There’s little but evil in its DNA. It’s not concerned with making things better, exploding yesterday’s orthodoxies, etc - it’s just concerned with domination, control, subordination and other obsolete massconomy games.

I’m not opposed to behavioral targeting either, Fred, but a global opt-out wouldn’t kill it.

The questions around Zuckerberg are what bug me. If there wasn’t similar scrutiny around Google at this point in its rise (and I’m not so sure there wasn’t) could it be that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had cleaner more appealing “DNA” than Zuckerberg?