An iMedia contributor puts the recent Facebook debacle into perspective, and shows what we can learn from the company's CEO's awkward apology.

Anyone in our business might be susceptible to Facebook fatigue by now, since there has been so much coverage of their folly over the last few weeks. Something else happened during the same time period, and I'm going to throw it out there as an object lesson.

On September 8, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger apologized for saying the lone Latina Republican lawmaker in California had a "very hot," fiery personality because of her ethnicity, a comment captured on audio tape last spring in his private office.

The governor made his apology in Santa Monica standing next to Bonnie Garcia, the Latina State Assemblywoman whom Schwarzenegger had characterized as hot-blooded.

"Anyone out there who feels offended by these comments, I just want to say I'm sorry," Schwarzenegger said. "The fact is that if I would hear this kind of comment in my house, by my kids, I would be upset, and today, when I read it in the papers… it's something when you say things, but it is another thing when you read it in the paper. It made me cringe. It made me feel uncomfortable. And so this is why I thought I should come out and address the issue right away."

This is an apology. It made no effort at defense. One of the reasons that nobody east of the Mississippi probably heard about this is because the Governator did the right thing. More often than not, whether clients believe it or not, doing the right thing with no hint of defensiveness is actually good PR. It makes the problems go away so you can get on with the business of the day.

Which brings us to back to Facebook. As was all over the news recently, Facebook, one of the new darlings of the user-generated content (UGC) set, decided to place a "news feed" on the home page of every user. This RSS feed enabled users to see details of their social network, time-stamped to the minute. Facebook's eight to nine million subscribers suddenly were able to know instantly when people "friended" each other, when people added photos or when new members joined their network.

The feature also enabled users instantly to see all recent changes to the site of the friend being updated.

According to some reports in our industry trades and some in publications such as Forbes, amazingly, as many as 200,000 users joined online protest groups within the site in less than an hour, dubbing the new feature stalker-like and an invasion of their privacy.

This news feed was not provided with an off switch, although users were able to block or limit non-friends from seeing their profiles, which fed directly into the news feed.

When I first heard about this controversy, I literally said to a colleague that it was the most post-modern tempest in a teacup yet online, since this is a user set that has no idea what that idiom implies, and even less idea why their PII is worth more than the advertising they are subject to on the Facebook site. In other words, who cares?

This is the media cohort that is built on voyeurism, after all. And the features that were being introduced would probably cost Facebook money by reducing the page views of their users. In other words, 22-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- who has steadfastly called his company a technology company, despite the fact that they sell no technology and are, in fact, a media company that sells eyeballs like many others -- was just following his muse. He was introducing cool new technology. Can you blame him? I mean, being able to see when your stalker is doing their stalking is, in fact, pretty cool, no?

The guys who ran MySpace knew what they had-- an enormous, online playground within a frat house that they could monetize. And boy did they ever. Their buyers from News Corp get this better than anyone, which makes me wonder why they sold their souls (and users) to Google recently. Making a quick buck, perhaps?

The reason that the MySpace deal makes sense for them is that advertisers know better. It's nearly impossible to control your brand message in such sites or networks as these. The value is in the user PII, and the ancillary buzz that emanates from their pages. Rest assured, however, that none of this is technology-- it's not even terribly complicated.

What it is, of course, is media. It's a new kind of media, but it has already developed the musky, awkward scent that characterizes the aforementioned frat houses. But, when you're a 22-year-old CEO whose $100M baby from last year might be worth $1B now, it won't occur to you to do the simple thing and check with your users first before introducing something that might piss them off. Blanket apologies with no defensiveness are from a level of sophistication that may as well be in another galaxy.

"We didn't take away any privacy options," said Mr. Zuckerberg. "The privacy rules haven't changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn't see it before the changes. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do-- your friends."

Dude-- your users know better. This isn't about friends. It's about something else entirely that has little or nothing to do with friends. They know it, why don't you? Friends don't need a website to nurture their friendships. Of course, this never occurred to you. After all, you're running a technology company. It's not about the users, right? Just apologize and move on with your mission of helping people help their friends and communicate with them-- something that clearly was barely possible before the advent of the web. If your governor can apologize and move on, how hard can it be?

Mark Naples is managing partner at WIT Strategy.  Read full bio.