Which company are you: the Pusher

In an ongo­ing series of posts on the dif­fer­ences between large tech com­pa­nies, I look at the dif­fer­ent mod­els they take (attach, push, tin­ker, refine) and who their spir­i­tual chil­dren may be. In this entry, it’s all about the pusher.

The Pusher: Facebook

Face­book is no stranger to con­tro­versy around pri­vacy. I would even ven­ture to say that no com­pany has gone fur­ther to force the dis­cus­sion about what pri­vacy means in the inter­net age. How­ever, this doesn’t mean that it did so in a way that left every­one happy.

Facebook’s atti­tude when it comes to pri­vacy is one of find­ing the edge and then going sub­stan­tially beyond it. As one would expect, this sub­stan­tial over-reach gen­er­ally results in as large a push­back but, when all is said and done, Face­book always ends up hav­ing moved the edge a lit­tle fur­ther, cre­at­ing a world where the def­i­n­i­tion of pri­vacy ends up a lit­tle more relaxed.

In 2007, Face­book pushed the edge of online adver­tis­ing by unveil­ing the face­book bea­con, a pro­gram where face­book pub­lished data from exter­nal sites into its user feeds. The pro­gram was extremely con­tro­ver­sial at the time, result­ing in a class action law­suit and the even­tual clos­ing of face­book bea­cons in 2009.

Since then, Face­book has intro­duced Face­book con­nect, which does basi­cally the same thing, but the reac­tion, this time around, has been largely pos­i­tive. With the approach now val­i­dated and users appar­ently accept­ing it, Face­book decided to drop the con­nect moniker alto­gether and just merge it back into the exist­ing face­book brand.

Move the marker

A suc­cess­ful pusher cre­ates new prod­uct fea­tures by mov­ing the marker in terms of what is con­sid­ered accept­able behav­ior. In most cases, such a move cre­ates controversy.

Den­nis Crow­ley can be as another pusher. Back in the early part of the last decade, he cre­ated Dodge­ball, a com­pany that allowed users to broad­cast where they were to their friends. At the time, some peo­ple had con­cern about the pri­vacy issues relat­ing to loca­tion data, espe­cially after Dodge­ball was acquired by Google.

In 2009, Crow­ley, hav­ing left Google, launched Foursquare, a prod­uct that looks and feels like a mod­ern ver­sion of Dodge­ball. This time, there hasn’t been as much con­tro­versy but the relent­less effort of Crow­ley in the mobile loca­tion space has cre­ated a whole new sec­tor, with com­peti­tors and inno­va­tors now try­ing to compete.

In this case, Crow­ley has, as an indi­vid­ual across three dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies,  moved the marker around how accept­able it is to broad­cast loca­tion data.

A pusher pushes the enve­lope and one could argue that this cat­e­gory rep­re­sents the clos­est thing to rev­o­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ers. With­out push­ers, major leaps can­not be made.