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Facebook May Finally Have To Compromise Its User Experience In Order To Keep Growing (recode.net)
Tony Haile, writing for Recode: Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won't drive its growth for the next five. However, the options in front of the company involve the kind of user experience compromises that have maimed platforms that preceded it. Facebook makes its money from the West. Some 30 percent of its users and 73 percent of its revenue is from North America and Europe. The monthly average revenue per user for Western users is $3.33 versus 53 cents for the rest of the world. Facebook is a global company, but a Western business. Facebook's user growth in the West is a little over 1 percent a quarter. In North America, Facebook's monthly active users represent 80 percent of the population above the age of 14. If Facebook wishes to grow its Western revenue at the rate its shareholders demand, a 1 percent user growth rate will not do it. Absent rapid user growth, the other lever for increasing advertising revenue is increasing the number or value of ads that are shown to existing users. However, the News Feed is close to saturation. Facebook believes that it cannot stick any more ads in the News Feed without adversely affecting user retention. This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
but I don't see any advertisements. Ever.
No game crap and only a few reminders that I asked for.
Of course, that's because I installed adblock and anti-js tracker everywhere I go. So that may have something to do with it.
Whatever money FB is making off me can't be all that much.
They need three companies to activate that feature. The first one is Google, the second one is Facebook. We know the third one won't be Apple
Google would refuse, so if three are needed (why is that?), and assuming that Facebook would play ball, you need two more.
How do I know Google would refuse? I work for Google and anything like that would be so severely opposed by the culture at Google that there's just no way it would happen, even if management wanted it to -- and management wouldn't. Sergey Brin, in particular, would be up in arms, as would most of the senior technical staff and lots of the rest. Larry Page would also be opposed, but I don't think he'd throw the screaming fit I'd expect from Brin. About the only way it could happen is if it were forced by legislation, and it wouldn't happen quietly, the lobbying would be loud and ferocious. If it still somehow happened there would be a hundred Google Snowdens. Or a thousand. I'd be one of them (though I think I could do it without being caught or having to flee).
Speaking of Snowden, that's a great example. I was working for Google in 2013 when Snowden's leaks came out and the immediate reaction to the PRISM stuff was utter disbelief with a strong leavening of readiness to grab pitchforks if it were somehow remotely true. There were some really heated TGIFs (weekly company-wide meeting). Then we found that the the NSA was tapping fiber between data centers, and people calmed down since it meant Google wasn't cooperating... and immediately set about making sure that every bit of data flowing across Google networks was encrypted. We already had a great key management infrastructure in place and the "encrypt everything" project had been in progress for some time.
And when I say "immediately" I mean "faster than was realistically possible". Deadlines for full compliance were short and completely immovable. One of the teams I work with made heavy use of sharded MySQL (which unlike Bigtable provides transactional consistency) via JDBC, but the standard MySQL JDBC stack provides no mechanism for encryption and it wasn't feasible to just run it in a TLS tunnel. So the team had less than 30 days to design, build, test and deploy a secure replacement that integrated with Google's key management infrastructure. And note that it had to work at Google scale; thousands, if not tens of thousands, of queries per second. They did, at least, already have a secure substrate to use. Google's key management and secure networking infrastructure is great.
Close to the deadline, it was discovered that there was a nasty and very hard to debug race condition that caused intermittent deadlocks (IIRC; it was something like that). In desperation the team said that if they didn't get more time they might have to just shut down for a week or two. Since they built/ran the billing systems, which collect and distribute all the money and a shutdown would inevitably create losses in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, they figured that would get them a postponement. The answer from management was that they might have to shut down for a week or two, the deadline was not moving. As it turned out some amazing heroics plus a fair amount of bubble gum and baling twine kept things going until they solved all the problems.
So... that's how Googlers feel about sharing information with the government. And if that really surprises you, then you don't know nerds.
People assume that since Google tracks a great deal of user information to use in targeted advertising that Googlers must not care much about privacy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Google tracks user data, but is extraordinarily careful to ensure that it doesn't leak, not even internally, and isn't used for other purposes. And it is not sold; to government or anyone else.
It's no accident that Google is not among the many, many companies who've suffered leakage/loss of user data (with the exception of whatever
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