Last week, as the outrage grew over the privacy implications of Facebook’s new ambitions to spread its tentacles deeper into the Web, Michael offered some advice to MySpace. This is MySpace’s moment to shine, he argued:
MySpace, the once great social network that still has scores of millions of active users, should be reworking their policies and products at a feverish pace to provide the perception of giving users fair and easy to use privacy controls along with a promise never to change those controls without their express permission. YOUR DATA IS SAFE WITH US is how the messaging would read.
It looks like MySpace took our advice. Today, co-president Mike Jones announced that MySpace will roll out new, simplified privacy settings. The options will be simplified to “public, friends only, or public to anyone 18 or over.” In a blog post Jones writes:
We respect our users’ desires to balance sharing and privacy, and never push our users to an uncomfortable privacy position. That’s why we give our users control over their data, following the fundamentals of notice and choice.
Well played, sir. Well played.
MySpace is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by Friendster, MySpace quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network, before being overtaken by Facebook. User pages are highly customizable and support integration with widgets such as Slide or YouTube. MySpace provides users with a way to connect around content and culture. MySpace was started as a side project of the internet marketing company eUniverse (now called Intermix Media) in August...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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