The saying “those who forget the past are destined to repeat it” has just gotten its prime Internet-related example in Facebook. Barely a year after outrage broke out over the displaying of information in their newly launched ‘News Feeds’, Facebook decided to try its users’ tolerance for privacy again and launched its ‘Beacon’ project aimed at showing your friends (and advertisers) what exactly you were doing and buying on 3rd party sites. Well now once again, after weeks of criticism, Facebook has finally relented and will make changes to ‘Beacon’ to appease its users – just like it had to do a year ago with the ‘News Feed’.

While I was actually a fan of the ‘News Feeds’ from the beginning (all of that information was already out there, Facebook just was organizing it better), ‘Beacon’ was something completely different and I immediately recognized it as a bad idea from the get go – as did many others who watch such things.

Just like they didn’t scrap the ‘News Feeds’, but rather made the privacy settings more strict and more clear, they now are basically doing the same thing with the ‘Beacon’ settings – with one very important difference: making it so you have to opt-in to the program rather than that being the default setting. As to who would want to opt-in to this I’m not really sure, but you can bet that Facebook is betting that some people will.

And thus history has repeated itself – and in barely a year’s time. One thing is for certain – for all of Facebook’s brilliance and growing power they are absolutely awful at subtle feature launches and seemingly gauging the temperature of their own community. As I said at the beginning of the month:

What I really don’t understand is what is with all the pomp and circumstance for such an announcement? I would think Facebook would want to roll out something like this quietly so as not to piss off users…

…which of course is exactly what they did. If you’re going to punch someone in the face, you don’t call a press conference to announce it beforehand – you do it and hope you knock them senseless so they don’t even realize what you just did.