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The problem with nudging:
By Peter Kirwan |01 October 2010
"Some companies do it less than others. Although I suspect it adopts a tougher stance with business customers, Google has remained a reluctant nudger in consumer markets. If you’re a fan, you probably believe that this is because the company goes with the grain, striving to do no evil. If you’re a sceptic, you’ll argue that Google’s approach to its users is made possible by a cash-generative advertising business. Either way, the interpretation is largely positive.
Aggressive nudging causes problems. As corporate self-interest becomes more important than user satisfaction, the nudging company’s approach to consumers becomes fragmented and incoherent.
Something like this, I suspect, happened to Windows during the past decade as Microsoft struggled to cope with the emergence of the web. The company’s vast promotional campaigns for Windows tended to focus as much on the company’s achievements as the benefits conferred upon users. The self-regarding nature of these campaigns told us something about the company’s attentuated links with its customers.
It’s time, I suspect, to ask a similar question about Facebook. Does Mark Zuckerberg understand that his company’s future increasingly depends not so much on its ability to churn out killer code, but on its ability to treat users right?
People aren’t stupid. Users who care about these things know what to expect from a company that has altered its privacy policies to suit itself on multiple occasions during the past five years. A few months ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked its readers to coin neologisms for “the act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users”. Here’s a selection of what came back: "Zuckermining", "Infozuckering", "Zuckerpunch", "Facebooking", "Facebaiting" and "Facebunk"."
Read the full post:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/01/love-google-hate-facebook#
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