Seeing as the entirety of the blogosphere has chimed in on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s apology posting on the Faceboook Blog already, let me just say a few thoughts.

First of all, as I noted last week, we’ve seen an eerily similar situation before from Facebook, though on a smaller scale will the news feeds – Mathew Ingram channels Yogi Berra, “It’s like deja vu all over again” – and guess what the end result of that was? Facebook partially rolling back changes, creating new settings for others, and Zuckerberg apologizing. Sound familiar?

Zuckerberg doesn’t mention that fiasco in his post, but you can bet he’s aware of it – he’s now had two fairly major PR screw-ups in about a year’s time. Yet, it’s smart for him not to mention it, no one wants to have to quote Britney Spears with “Oops, I did it AGAIN”. But that’s the thing, while many of us in the blogosphere remember that incident, many in the outside world either a) don’t remember b) don’t care enough to remember or c) never heard of it to begin with. I’ve hesitated to write a lot about this whole new situation because I know that a few months from now the same three things – no matter how wrong it is – are going to be in play again with the vast majority of Facebook users.

Here’s a conversation I can imagine having:
Me: “Did you tell Facebook not to send out any of your 3rd party information?”
Friend: “No. What does that mean?”
Me: “Didn’t you hear about how Facebook was tracking your 3rd party actions on Facebook? You should make sure they aren’t right now.”
Friend: “Hold on, I just want to see who wrote on my wall.”

Like Valleywag, I too saw the ‘Have you heard of Facebook Beacon’ poll the other day in my feed. I of course voted ‘Yes’ (the only sponsored poll on Facebook I’ve ever voted in), but the results indicated that nearly 70% voted ‘No’. While Valleywag thinks Facebook itself may have sponsored the poll – and I would agree with that – it really doesn’t matter who did, it simply goes a long way in showing just how much trouble Facebook was looking at with this screwup. The answer: not too much.

Yes, the blogosphere is in a tizzy, and yes some advertisers are pulling out or debating pulling out of Beacon, but at the end of the day, the users will remain – and guess what, more will keep signing up. This in turn will bring the advertisers back, no matter how “betrayed” they feel – it’s always about the bottom line. If the users are on Facebook, the advertisers will be on Facebook.

In the blogosphere I think we often play off each other and get ourselves all worked up about something – and for the record I do think this is something to be worked up about – but while we hastily declare the ‘end of Facebook’, we forget that many of the other 99.99% of people in the world (to go back to my 3 points) either: a) won’t remember about this a few months from now b) won’t care enough to remember this a few months from now or c) never heard about this to begin with.

Part of it is the fast-paced, ever-updating world we live in, part of it is that a lot of people, for whatever reason, just don’t care about things that maybe they should. We all do it – I write about things all the time that I think are big deals, but then not only will I never talk about them again, I won’t even remember them in a few months.

So yes, Facebook’s demise was greatly exaggerated. While it would nice, as Om Malik suggests, for Facebook to run new changes by the community before they do them, that simply won’t work in all situations. It would turn Facebook into Congress, nothing would ever get done because of a constant back and forth – if you ask people if they have a problem with something, some people are going to find a problem with it.

That’s why – as wrong as it may be – I suggested Facebook roll out changes such as these as quietly as possible instead of holding a press conference to announce their bad idea to world with pomp and circumstance. To reiterate:

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.

Otherwise you get this situation and you have to spend your valuable time making apologies posts that the majority of your users will never read.