The Opt-Out of a Century

Before we finally let go of the Facebook Beacon saga, and put that nightmare to rest (or at least until they violate their user base's privacy again), there's one blog post worth re-looking at, just for a laugh, from Nick Carr. It's from November 6th 2007, the momentous centennial on which everything in the known universe changed...and Beacon was announced.

“Once every hundred years media changes," boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it's true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you'll see that every century, like clockwork, there's been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day - the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it.

Just read Nick's post. It's even better now than it was a month ago.