Endster

"This is the end, beautiful friend," sang Jim Morrison in "The End" long ago.

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end," sang Semisonic in "Closing Time" a few years ago.

These were the lyrics running through my head when I read that (a guy whose Friendster profile I had just looked up last week) Scott Sassa, Friendster CEO, fired Joyce Park, one of my favorite people in the world.

This brings up so many feelings, so I'll just roll with it here.

First off, it's amazing how quickly this story shot around the Blogosphere, thanks in part to what Jeremy Zawodny wrote last night,

I'm really resisting the urge to say what I really think about Friendster's current and past management. I think it speaks for itself. Do you think they'll add a "bloggers need not apply" banner on their jobs page? I'm guessing not. Why? Because "you can work on social networking, but you cannot blog" just doesn't sound right, does it? Now, pardon me while I got figure out how to cancel my Friendster account. I suggest you do the same.

There's no such thing as bad publicity, but it's clear that Friendster did not think about the implications of letting Joyce go a few weeks before the 2004 version of O'Reilly Foo Camp, which several people she knows are attending.

It's hard to believe a company would fire someone like Joyce over her blog posts, because among bloggers she's one of the more careful and considerate people I've met. As Matt Haughey wrote, "she never dropped any company secrets and simply commented on the popular news around Friendster's switch from java to PHP." Scobleizer added,

As a manager they should be worried more about the signal it sends to the other employees. If I worked at Friendster now I'd be stepping up my job search efforts cause I wouldn't want to work for an employer that treated employees as something to be tossed aside when there's the first hint of negative PR. But, there's probably another side to the story on the Friendster issue that we're not hearing -- HR is usually silenced due to threats of lawsuits, etc.

So I went back to the source. Wrote Joyce about the incident,

I was terminated from Friendster today. The reason given was blogging. The levels of irony on this are pretty deep. For one thing, I wrote a fairly well-known paper last year about the need for semi-permeable blogging. For another thing, by all accounts the particular posts that led to my termination were this one and this one (although feel free to check my archives for any other incriminating information). I try really hard not to blog about anything that is not a matter of public record... but I guess that's not protection any more. You get Slashdotted, make Udell's column, lose your job. And finally, it's especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves...

There are already over 120 Technorati links from other peoples' blogs to Joyce's post; news.com picked up the story; and even a hopscotch of stars of the Blogosphere from Jeffrey McManus to Boing Boing to Joi Ito (who went to U Chicago the same time Joyce did) have written about the subject.

(As an aside -- Jon Udell is a classy guy; look at this wonderful thank you he offers Joyce...)

The Friendly fire discussions over the past few days make me wonder why anyone would want to blog about work at all. For example, Danah Boyd wrote, "In the last 7 years, i have never signed an agreement with any company or organization that forbids me to blog. Or at least, i do not believe that i have. That said, i have often opted not to blog about the work that i do for companies." (Six months ago Danah wrote that she is a fan of the people who breathed life into Friendster, of which Joyce was one of the most important; thanks to Joyce users no longer complain about Friendster's speed -- now they just complain that there's nothing to do there. :)

Back to blogging about work. Wrote Ross Mayfield about the incident,

I’ll hold opinion until the other side has its say. There are so many threads in this to be explored. Employee blogging policy, education, leadership, PR, setting market expectations, architecture, supporting advocacy, supporting research, supporting open source, competitive strategy and social network relations. But, wait, the other side isn’t going to have its say. Any company that comments on the details of the termination of an employee opens themselves up to lawsuits. It’s a good time for a standard employee blogging policy that bloggers can bring to their companies to set expectations and a way of doing things right.

Well stated.

Friendster should not have told Joyce they were terminating her for blogging. In California they don't have to give a reason, and giving a reason only made them look bad. "We're firing you for blogging" almost certainly begs a blogpost about the subject as soon as a person gets home, which only feeds on itself and gains momentum like a rolling snowball as news propogates to places like Red Herring.

I think a lot of the issues Joyce brought up a year ago in her paper on semi-permeable blogging are still relevant; specifically, she wrote,

In the past the promise of privacy in communication media has led to an increase in expression. For this reason, we think it rather unlikely that increased privacy would lead to a disastrous closing off of the great conversation that is the Internet. Instead, it will create more rooms in the mansion: those who wish can still shout their ideas from the street, while others will choose to unburden themselves only to trusted friends in their own living rooms. Obviously everyone hopes that bloggers will choose to keep much of their expression public and free – but it should be each individual's choice to make, aided by software that recognizes the eternal tension between the human needs for freedom and privacy.

Software that understands the dual needs for freedom and privacy is still a goal; Friendster reinforced that yesterday when they asked Joyce to leave. Joyce, I'm with you. Wasn't it Garbage who once sang, "I’m only happy when it rains"? :)

Comments

[Adam]

The Blogger on the Payroll: "You have to accept that the bloggers are going to be real. Maybe the companies that have less to hide are going to be more comfortable with it." (Steve Rubel, VP of client services for CooperKatz)

...

"The obvious benefit is that we get our story out in front of the world, disintermediated. The less-obvious benefit is that blogs actually turn out to be an excellent vehicle for listening, not just talking. If some smart person out there has a good idea that we should look at, or sees something stupid we're doing, there's no obvious way to 'tell Sun.' But if there's someone whose name the person knows because they're blogging about the work they're doing in that area, they'll fire off an e-mail in a moment." (Tim Bray, Director of web technologies for Sun)

[Adam]

Joyce in comment 4 of Sterling's post on manufacturing serendipity: "Blogs are probably the greatest social network of all -- for those who have the necessary stick-to-it-iveness."