While I personally am all for that change, having been an ardent Twitter user since early last year, there has been plenty of backlash from Facebook users about the extent of these changes. And all of the usual suspects of the blogosphere are weighing in, with heavy-weights like TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble siding with Facebook’s right to basically do what it wants with the free service it provides.

Even going so far as arguing that listening to your customer too much can be counterproductive. Here is a quote from Mike Arrington’s piece "No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.":

In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.

If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

While I can see their point to a degree, social media represent a whole new ballgame in many ways, which it makes it harder to predict what will happen. While these “A camel is a horse designed by committee" ideas may have validity in the realm of physical product design (Scoble is using a quote from a mentor about the problems with crowd-sourcing the design of a Porsche), I would hold that things may not be so straight-forward in the digital/social media realm:

1) Facebook already had several cases where it needed to retreat in shame from changes to the Facebook platform, the biggest among them the Beacon activity-tracking system that caused such privacy concerns and general outrage among Facebook users that it had to basically be abandoned.

More recently, the above-mentioned Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debate around changes that appeared to give Facebook almost complete, irrevocable control over a users data and images even PAST the closing of an account, brought forth a similat swift user community response, and backing off by Facebook (for now to the original TOS, with supposedly a crowd-sourced version being on the way).

So with this partial retreat by Facebook, incidentally again due to privacy concerns, they’re really batting 0 for 3. One would think that they would be wising up on the PR front by now. And so much for "Zuckerberg never backs down"…

2) Much of this is not really surprising since Facebook’s users are perfectly empowered through Facebook’s platform:

Perfect for sharing photos with your friends, and throwing virtual sheep at them, but also perfect as a virtual soapbox to… complain about changes to Facebook’s platform.

With Facebooks recent full-scale mainstreaming, bringing it’s rate of new user adoption to well over 1 Million a day, one of the side effects is that now, even if only 1% of users strenuously object to something, that’s still close to 3 Million people howling.

And after all, it is called SOCIAL media, so most controversial/high impact messages have a tendency to spread virally, aided by speed of light technologies, AND Facebook cannot come off as looking patently anti-social.

So while Steve Gillmor is arguing that inertia would tend to win out, I’d say that he may be underestimating the righteous indignation that can come with perceived violations of SOCIAL trust.

Certainly there is room for back and forth here, but at some point, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it could snap. Users could turn their collective backs on Facebook, especially since the internet all around Facebook’s so-called "Walled Garden" is always continuing to hustle, and to add to the functionality available with quantum-leap innovations all of the time, making it less and less necessary for users to be locked into Facebook.

3) Which brings me to my last point: Facebook, having started from an, admittedly elegant (especially in comparison to MySpace) but mostly static, user profile page, has already been changing in response to "the rise of feeds". First the profile was redigned to look and feel more like FriendFeed, leaving a lot of the social apps to languish and whither on a back tab when compared to before (I certainly haven’t used many anymore since that point).

Next, the meteoric rise of Twitter, and its persistent "attention hogging", especially with the "hip early adopter" crowd, prompted an attempt by Facebook to buy Twitter (though the offer was mostly in hard to value Facebook stock), and now the redesign of the user’s homepage to look suspiciously like Twitter with it’s realtime feed of friends’ updates and activities.

But the truth is that Facebook users may not be ready for this level of speed, which Twitter users have already "living and breathing" for months or years at this point. Since I’ve been piping my Twitter updates to Facebook status updates, I’ve always worried that it was overloading my Facebook friends, and have recently throttled the pass-through way down.

So the jury is out whether Facebook users are en masse willing to take it to that level, or for that matter make use of the new possibilities of opening up one’s updates to the world (and thereby to Google to index). And since everyone all around Facebook is sharing things (like photos, which Facebook already just said in its TOS attempt it wants to hoard for itself), it may be hard to both maintain the Walled Garden, as well as open up Facebook in ways that could steal Twitter’s thunder.

So no, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has a completely free hand to play anymore. The ghosts that the sorcerers apprentice has called may prove harder and harder to call back. The monster that is Facebook is becoming harder and harder to control.

This should be fun to watch…

And one thing appears to be clear: Regardless of the merits of the technology and features behind the platform, Wallop never had much of a chance of succeeding during the same time frame in which first MySpace and then Facebook rose to massive prominence.

Why? Because the “Wallop” brand name that the new owners (presumably voluntarily) took over from Microsoft Research Labs is simply a horrible idea branding-wise.

One can almost see how a group of middle aged techies thought it sounded sort of cool. But as reality has proven, there are a number of things wrong with the name:

1) It is a generic noun/verb and as such creates little differentiation in the mental real estate of consumers.

2) It is confusing in terms of giving no indication what “Wallop” is supposed to do for its users. Brand names like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook on the other hand give a reasonable hint. When you are free to choose, when in doubt opt for something that makes a modicum of sense, and actually helps make your case as a company.

(Granted that a number of very successful companies have used “non-sequitur” names – Google, Amazon, and Yahoo come to mind. But that was during the Web 1.0 era when it was a lot easier to break through the noise, and get your share of attention to imprint your brand on the mental real estate of consumers. Also, back then everything Web was still so new and wondrous…)

3) Worst of all, the only association it does have is with something negative and somewhat archaic sounding, per the American Heritage Dictionary, “Wallop – v. tr. 1. To beat soundly; thrash. 2. To strike with a hard blow.”

Given that Wallop apparently started out as a photo sharing site at Microsoft Research, the name makes even less sense. But one should NEVER use a name in branding that conjures up potentially negative associations. Unless you know exactly what you are doing (as in some youth slang were “bad”, “ill”, etc. actually means “good” – or at least has in the past), and know your target market audience to a T.

Not so good if your 15-30 year-old target market for a social networking site associates your brand name (even if more or less unconsciously) with spankings they may have received by their parents, or on the playground.

4) It is missing any kind of pleasantness in sound, rhythm, or rhyme that would make it more likely to be repeated by people (to themselves or to others), which may seem trite, but in reality can make a huge difference in the adoption of your brand name “meme”.

Wallop rolls of the tongue like a sack of potatoes. Its particular combination of consonants and vowels leaves it oddly unpleasant to say (maybe that’s because the word originally denotes an unpleasant event). Just try it out-loud to yourself a few times: “Hey dude, go check out that party invite I put up on Wallop.”

5) There could be spelling issues in terms of people hearing it word-of-mouth (if it weren’t for the fact that people are already less likely to repeat it very often), as to the number of L’s and P’s, also never an advantage in getting something to spread “virally”.

Do your homework…

In regards to both 4) and 5), do your homework people: It’s easy enough to bounce names off of friends and family, and see what they think, and more importantly, if they can’t stop saying the new name – or not. See if people spell it right in writing each time without you spelling it out for them (the recent “Cuil” launch has become infamous in this regard).

Why am I kicking Wallop in such detail when they are already down? Only for this reason: To demonstrate that despite what I actually believe may have been some reasonably innovative technology, these good folks were never even close to helping their business venture from a branding perspective.

In this regard, it is very telling that they apparently neglected to hire a branding firm or other similar assistance when they spun-off Wallop from Microsoft Research, and kept the name (needlessly, as there likely was next to zero brand equity accrued to the name at that point).

There is always the danger/trap that as a business founder you become attached to a name created during an incubation phase that has simply grown on you. Or appears clever TO YOU in one way or another (and is often too-cute-by-half). None of which guarantees that anyone else will think so, which is why you need to ideally test such names with your target market (of course some simply get lucky, such as Facebook).

And when you are trying to launch a social network, something that almost by definition needs to make use of “viral” network effects, the above factors, and hence the rate and speed with which your brand spreads, do indeed matter.

Just ask the guys who got it right almost accidentally, like Facebook. Ignore these principles in your own small business branding at your peril.