Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Facebook does this routinely, and yet people go back.
Would you be surprised if news broke that Facebook has been selling your private messages to third parties? Not really. What if Google did that? That would cause uproar, so G+ is competitive in terms of user control.
Is there a tradeoff between user control and social connections that users face when using Facebook? Were this the case, G+ would have much higher market share and users would have already started flooding away, with the network effect in play.
But that's not the case. Control is relatively negligible to the majority of Facebook users. Competitors won't succeed until values change.
Personally, I value control. I'd be done with Facebook were it not for its White Pages functionality - with a name, you can find someone and contact them. That's not the case for the majority though, so having other competitive systems won't do much good.
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Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Facebook does this routinely, and yet people go back.
Would you be surprised if news broke that Facebook has been selling your private messages to third parties? Not really. What if Google did that? That would cause uproar, so G+ is competitive in terms of user control.
Is there a tradeoff between user control and social connections that users face when using Facebook? Were this the case, G+ would have much higher market share and users would have already started flooding away, with the network effect in play.
But that's not the case. Control is relatively negligible to the majority of Facebook users. Competitors won't succeed until values change.
Personally, I value control. I'd be done with Facebook were it not for its White Pages functionality - with a name, you can find someone and contact them. That's not the case for the majority though, so having other competitive systems won't do much good.