Maybe most of your clients aren’t college students who have all day to setup petitions and community groups berating your latest innovations… but here’s what would happen if they were:
Facebook, the popular social-networking site recently integrated a whole slew of new tracking technology. What was a simple site to connect with friends and share photos is now being descibed as a ’stalker’ site - too much information is being shared about your every move.
Well, talk about instant feedback. One petition has over 12,000 signatures, and there are over 130 “groups” where members have joined to urge a removal of the features (groups often have names like “Fans of the OC”… these have names like “What happened to the old facebook?”, “What The F*ck Happened to Facebook”, and “WE HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK!”)

Clients frequently look to pile on features, and programmers are all to happy to charge for new gadgets, but it’s easy to go too far.

Some things we can learn:

1) respect user’s privacy
2) let users turn on new features which publicize information (dont just give them the option to undo your work)
3) *test* acceptance of these new features out on a smaller group (Facebook began at one school - and perhaps it should roll out new features in the same pattern - a digital “Chicago Trial”)
4) let your users know what is coming before you unleash it

For fun, take a look at the 13 pages listing the over 130 anti-Facebook-change groups:

Groups Asking, What Happend to Facebook? (PDF, 1.6mb)