Corvus Consulting

A couple weeks ago I was ready to write a short reflection on customer relations gone super-sour, featuring Airbnb. Luckily, I have a black belt in procrastination, which gives these situations time to spin out some more and to make a more interesting story.

The background: a few weeks ago a woman named Emily in San Francisco rented her place through Airbnb and had it thoroughly trashed by a renter in what seems to be a fit of gleeful nihilism by a person bent on bringing as much destruction and pain into a home as possible. The victim had been working things through with Airbnb and decided to blog about her experience, cautioning others and, I think, just venting.

In the days that followed, Airbnb’s actions and lack of actions painted a picture of a company caught in a vortex of legal paranoia and public relations handling from the 6th circle of hell. Fast forward ten days and we find they’ve managed to really turn it around. The missteps as well as the fixes make a fantastic case study in how to do wrong, and then right, by your customers.
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It’s good to see people talking about Facebook’s dissolution of the privacy walls its members were accustomed to. With any active discussion you get disagreement, but I wasn’t ready to see sentiments suggesting that people deserve embarrassing exposure because they made the mistake of trusting Facebook, or any web service for that matter.

Chris Pirillo, long standing web citizen, really surprised me with this tweet today:

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It would be disheartening to watch Facebook’s radical dissolution of privacy walls and their reach into the rest of the web had there not been an outpouring of concern and criticism from many smart people. The best commentary I’ve read so far:

• Liz Gannes wrote an early but spot-on assessment of how Instant Personalization tries to force a new norm onto the web, where you can be known to any website so long as you’re signed into Facebook.
• Thomas Vanderwal captures the problematic situations that Facebook creates by steadily deprecating privacy.
• Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb, the site name I still can’t say quickly, writes about the strong-arm tenor in the privacy options transitioning interfaces.

There’s a lot to chew on with the moves that Facebook is making, but after seeing NewsFeed, Beacon and now the latest in F8, a pattern of behaviour emerges that I don’t think I can live with anymore:

1. Establish a norm that people are comfortable with.
2. Allow trust to be built on that norm
3. Impose without warning a new set of rules that are advantageous to themselves alone.
4. Architect the new reality as a labyrinth of vaguely worded options that must be absorbed and understood in real time, as the changes they refer to already happened.
5. Wait until the audience reaches a point of comfortable non-awareness or total submission. Unless sponsors complain, like they did with Beacon.

Facebook isn’t the only company to deploy technological changes without warning or consideration of their impact on real lives. But, taking a line from Rush, they’re old enough to know what’s right and weak enough not to choose it.

What happened, Facebook? You used to put on such great parties: at your place we could hang out with the people around us and share in a way that was comfortable and carefree. Our mistake was believing that a respect for privacy, which you used to do well, was inherent to your character. Now we know better, but we still have to ask, what happened?

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If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.

Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.

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