Without me (and people like me), they don't have a site. So, yeah, I'm their customer. I'm what makes their site a viable business. I'm about as from "just a user" as you can get.
On a ranting note, this attitude is incredibly offensive to the users of social networks and SaaS providers; and I'm stunned to see it met with so much traction on a community of startup owners. If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.
"Customer" and "user" are just words. To me, "customer" implies that you are paying, but I'm fine with adopting a different usage of the word for purposes of this discussion.
If you are a person who actually complains about Facebook's actions, then I disagree that without people like you, they don't have a site. Most users/customers don't appear to complain at all; they just keep using FB and adapting to the changes and never even think about the longer-term consequences. If all the people who actually are complaining now up and leave, FB will still have plenty of users/customers.
The only way that will change is if lots of users/customers start to believe that the costs of using FB outweigh the benefits. And the only way that will change is if people who can actually find or build alternatives, like the owners of businesses that make heavy use of the Internet, lead the way.
> If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.
So, basically, you're saying Facebook is doing it wrong. Please tell Mark Zuckerberg, not me.
[Edit: added the below.]
> So, yeah, I'm their customer. I'm what makes their site a viable business.
I should probably unpack a little why I object to the word "customer" in this context. I agree that a customer doesn't have to "pay" in money; any exchange of value for value will do for that aspect of it.
But a customer knows the price of what he is buying. Facebook doesn't set a price on your usage of the site; you just use it. That means you and Facebook can't exchange price signals to optimize the exchange of value; you send plenty of "signals" to Facebook as part of your usage of the site, but those signals optimize their exchange of value with advertisers and marketers, not with you.
Economically speaking, this is the root cause of the problems the OP is complaining about; he has to post his complaint on his blog because he has no way of influencing FB the way a real customer would, through his purchasing behavior. (Except, of course, for the very crude option of "stop using the site altogether", which is the one I would favor. If enough people actually do that, FB might be motivated to look for ways to make its users into real customers instead of pseudo-customers. But I wouldn't hold my breath.)
On a ranting note, this attitude is incredibly offensive to the users of social networks and SaaS providers; and I'm stunned to see it met with so much traction on a community of startup owners. If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.