Facebook gets too sticky

The New York Times reported on 11 Feb­ru­ary 2008 that Face­book users were unable to delete their pro­files and data from the social net­work­ing site. Man­hat­tan con­sul­tant Nipon Das has become a reluc­tant exam­ple, through his two-month strug­gle to can­cel his Face­book membership.

In many Internet-related indus­tries, stick­i­ness is a high pri­or­ity. Con­tent pub­lish­ers and web site oper­a­tors want cus­tomers to return again and again to their prop­er­ties. Return vis­its mean more adver­tis­ing rev­enue and sales opportunities.

What hap­pens if your cus­tomers want to leave?

When web sites col­lect per­sonal infor­ma­tion, cus­tomers some­times find they are stuck. I’m one of those folks who con­tin­ues to receive unwanted email and text mes­sages from ser­vices that I tried and later aban­doned. I’ve got my own ways of unstick­ing myself from their cus­tomer data­bases, but that’s another story.

As I reported on 20 June 2007 and 10 August 2007, more pro­fes­sional users are try­ing social net­work­ing sites like MySpace and Face­book. This is a dif­fi­cult mar­ket to enter, as Busi­ness Week dis­cussed on 22 Sep­tem­ber 2007.

Accord­ing to this 13 Feb­ru­ary 2008 arti­cle in the Times, Face­book is try­ing to deal with user dele­tion requests. The ear­lier arti­cle attracted more atten­tion to the issue. Right now, the dele­tion process is man­ual, and most users will need assis­tance from Face­book cus­tomer ser­vice representatives.

As a friendly note to my stu­dents, I do not require any­one to sign up for a Face­book account. The Face­book badge that I use on my blog is a handy way to dis­play my email address. I used to repub­lish my blog arti­cles to my Face­book page, but I’ve stopped doing that.

No one has to sign up for a user account at billso.com, either. These user accounts are help­ful for peo­ple who want to leave com­ments on the site, but the cur­rent ver­sion of the site works just fine for anony­mous users. It was more trou­ble than it was worth to require logins on my course web pages, espe­cially since I man­age the assign­ments and grades in TurnItIn.com.

See my other arti­cles about Face­book from 3 Jan­u­ary 2008 and 28 May 2007 for more infor­ma­tion about that service.

Tagged as: customer, facebook, network, new-york, privacy, social, teaching, usability