Facebook Fail: The end of Facebook…

I’m not one for grandstanding but the word reaches me this morning via Zee at the Next Web that Facebook have done something incredibly silly. They have declared unilaterally that they own your Data. That’s right every photo, every bog post every status update is theirs to do with as they wish.

You are apparently privileged to be a customer of Facebook and shall be treated with the contempt you deserve. As far as I’m concerned this is the end of Facebook, not in the short term though. But it guarantees that it won’t be viable as a commercial platform in the longer term and creates an opportunity for competing platforms to exploit.

Facebook has an unhealthy obsession with attempting to capture all the value while marginalising it’s users and partners. It has a record of competing with developers on it’s platform and abusing user data for it’s own gain. And at a time when I expected them to loosen their grip on user data to allow their platform to spread and dominate the entire market completely they have done the opposite.

This opens so many opportunities to competitors that, unless it changes this, and fast, I see this as the beginning of the end for Facebook. I don’t think they’re going out of business or anything, the masses of investment and current user base ensures that, but I do think they are starting down a road that leads to Hi5.

Facebook thinks that privacy is the issue, it’s going to find out very soon that the real issue for people on the social web is trust, privacy is practically irrelevant.

Assuming this isn’t changed I will be deleting my account there over the next week and I’m just glad that I was too lazy to ever add a lot of data to it in the first place. See you on some other service, probably twitter or friendfeed or (perhaps one of our Udoogoo networks)

How do you feel (and I mean YOU not how you think others will feel) about Facebook owning everything you use there? Happy about it?