Matt Cutts & Other Google Engineers Close Facebook Accounts

Apr 23, 2010 at 9:58am ET by Greg Sterling

I was pointed to a tweet by Matt Cutts that indicates he’s “deactivated” his Facebook account:

He in turn points to a GigaOM post that explains how to block some of the “instant personalization” changes that Facebook is implementing as part of its Open Graph announcements on Wednesday.

This is a fairly drastic step by Matt; is it a protest or is he personally concerned about privacy?

Postscript: Apparently this is a wider “movement” than just Matt. Other Google engineers are doing the same: http://bit.ly/dwKHim

Thanks Tim Cohn for pointing this out.

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Top News

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://www.seroundtable.com/ Barry Schwartz

Knowing Matt, he has never liked Facebook because it is “closed” where you cannot easily get your data out of it. So likely a protest of some kind.
Michael Gray

Does anyone else see the irony in him pointing to a post about blocking personalization when the search engine he works for provides personalization that they make incredibly difficult to turn off?
btabke

Sometimes it is just too easy:

Google’s Eric Schmidt:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48975
http://searchengineland.com/ Danny Sullivan

The downside is now when you search for Matt Cutts on Facebook, you only end up at an unofficial fan page:

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-deactivates-facebook-account-40543

I’d have encouraged him to create his own fan page and focus his activities there, if he wanted a way to be active on Facebook but have less to worry on the privacy side. That’s what I did back in December.

Of course, it’s still complicated in that you do have to have a personal account to manage that fan page — you can’t “act” as the fan page itself, which means some privacy worries remain.

If it is a protest over privacy, will Matt close his Buzz account now?

http://www.google.com/profiles/109412257237874861202#buzz

I think they’ve have a few issues, as well :)
http://searchmarketingcommunications.com Tim Cohn

Without further “personalization” Facebook’s annual revenue per user – $1 Billion / 500 million users = $2.00 a year – will continue to languish @ just $0.005 a day from each user.
http://www.sefati.net asefati

I think the main reason is that FB is slowly getting into the search market as they annouced they will be searching websites and etc and I believe they are the only one that can beat Google and redefine search from its current boring google\yahoo style of search to something more comprehesive.

I think Facebook will make google old news in a couple years or even less
Justin33

Search engine Optimization can spread in many ways like this using a social media. Facebook really gives a lot of help to broadcast many links… And I think facebook wants their consumer profile be private…
Tym

Now isn’t that a good example of the pot calling the kettle black!
http://www.billhartzer.com/ bhartzer

Luckily the Matt Cutts Facebook fan page is still alive and kicking.