as someone teaching a freshman class in the fall (at MSU–very different demographic) I will be interested to informally follow up on some of your questions–especially the MySpace question. My initial reaction is that perhaps freshman don’t feel comfortable enough to put such a well-established identity-space “out there” for new friends to see and judge them by. But this is purely an intuition. I’ll let you know!

I actually work as a researcher at a Humanities Computing center on campus. (we host/support h [dash] net [dot] org). One thing us researchers and developers are tossing around is “what would a facebook for the academic community look like?” and can we build it? Unfortunately, we are still trying to sell concept of RSS feeds and web-interaction over listservs, so lots of hurdles still.
but–maybe for a new generation of faculty?

I have also noticed the reduction in the presence of political affiliation. It may be because this is not a heated election year (or post-election heated analysis and grouching time).

The expansion of networks and the increase in the number of out-of-network friends also means that there is more intergenerational networking. For instance, most of my FB friends are from ex-Yugoslavia and they range from highschoolers and freshmen to alumni, grad students and staff – and nobody cares about the age/stage difference. That may be disturbing – just because we are all Yugoslavs (and post on each other’s Walls in Serbocroatian language) does not mean I am not a 40-year old predator of a Serbian highschool girl in Canada!

Something I never paid much heed to until now is Facebook’s advertising model (I’d attribute my lack of attention to Firefox’s adblock extension and my new interest to a summer job at a techonology/marketing place). Since so many companies are trying to jump into the social networking scene, it should be fun to see how they adapt to the community-based page model Facebook thusfar has implemented and in return how Facebook will change for advertisers. MySpace seems to have figured it out in their world and I’m wondering if Facebook’s advertising will change or grow beyond the “message board for fans of brand X” model. Have you looked at all into differences in advertising between college and high school Facebook? I’m not too familiar with high school Facebook so I’m wondering if advertisers make a distinction between the two.

I also wonder if there’s a trend towards group globalization. Yesterday I noticed that the Boy Meets World group at my school had over 1700 members, as opposed to the 80 or so I was used to seeing. It turns out it was swallowed up into a global BMW fan group, but the name/picture/profile/admins didn’t change. However, the message board, photos, group members, wall, and related groups were all converted to the global group. As a group creator myself I wonder how this process was initiated. This may have been a unique case, but I wonder if it is something we’ll see more of in the future.

Keep up the good work!

One thing that I think is now to Facebook’s detriment is the cessation of email notifications for community postings; it has caused many of the communities to become inactive. They have become less points of actual connection and more things to list on one’s profile, such as the “I went to a public school…Bitch” community. I wonder if you could do an analysis on how much of the activity/posting on facebook is person-to-person vs. person-to-community (I bet it leans heavily toward the former, with the facebook tools more optimized for individual messages right now).

appreciate the info.

A few points:

I think there is a self-censorship that we are already seeing and will continue to see in Facebook’s future… not just with regard to politics. I would like to imagine that a current freshman will remove questionable photos (more likely 350 questionable photos) before a job interview in a few years.

The massive increase in wall annotation is spurred by an interface construction empowering a convenience in creating messages and composing replies.
Point, click, type, and send.
Then a photo avatar and your comment appear on their wall. But perhaps Facebook should profanity filter to remove some of the crasser wall graffiti.

::poke::