As many of you are likely aware, the past month or so has been all-Facebook, all the time. It’s an exciting time for Facebook, though the whole “Facebook is the next…” genre or blog post is wearing a little thin. This post was inspired by an article Wired released a few days ago, entitled “As Facebook Grows, Longtime Users Draw Privacy Veil.” The gist of the article is that as more users flood the site, the long-time users are shuttering themselves from the world.
Research I’ve run confirms this; in fact, even baseline privacy statistics are telling. In January, I found that on average, 25% of users make their profiles completely private to strangers in-network; the superset that uses any privacy settings is likely much higher. Compared to 2005 and 2006, where I found privacy rates at 6 and 10%, that’s a very significant jump in just a year. Of course, the “opening” of Facebook is not the only factor at play in the privacy equation. Media reports and “stranger danger” all influence the decision, as well as many other factors.
I think the Wired article is particularly interesting, however, because it sheds some light on how the early adopters are reacting to this change. Let’s face it, “Open Facebook” and Facebook Applications have substantively changed how Facebook feels to the early adopter. These students now have to deal with unwanted friend requests from family members, high school classmates, distant relatives, strangers. Facebook is no longer a protected, bounded community, and this disrupted sense of community is important. In earlier iterations of “openness”, the response was significantly small enough that the sense of community was not disturbed globally (though undergrads who were spammed by high-schoolers may disagree). However, with the extreme interest and ramping adoption of the service as of late, there is a noticeable disruption in the community.
At the same time, Facebook applications are flooding the information space with Spam. Granted, Facebook understands this and is working to fix it (applications now have a Spamminess score), but this state change is also very important. A big factor in Facebook’s growth among college-students was its ability to provide relevant information very efficiently. Students could log in, see what their friends are doing, get information, and go on with their lives. Now, the information space is extremely cluttered. Whereas my newsfeed used to be full of updates about people I cared about, now it feels like an ad stream for applications as people try them out. Let me make a sneaker analogy: I don’t care about every pair you try on and put back when you’re shopping for sneakers, I care about the ones you actually buy. Perhaps Facebook could learn from this, and only notify me when someone has used an application for a while?
Of course, that’s just one issue with applications. While I like them (I’ve even created a few), I don’t see why applications have to come at the cost of information economy. To the early adopters, these changes are very significant. It’s a simple equation: More people into Facebook = less people I actually care about. At the same time, the clutter created in the information space by Applications are further diluting the power of the information “fix” Facebook provides, and I believe this is a very serious issue.
As we look at the early adopters, and see how they are shuttering themselves to the outside world, one wonders what this means about the network as a whole. Networks are living things, and the early adopters make up Facebook’s core network. If these people are shuttering themselves from the storm of adoption and application spam, the network certainly still grows at the fringe, but it is dying in the middle. Granted, networks are resilient, but centrality is above-all, and the center of Facebook’s network is reacting.
The longer I spend studying networks, the less I see them as “revolutions” or even all that different from everything else in life. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook all have had their moment in the sun, but like anything else, the audience is fickle. The early adopters who have shuttered themselves from the storm, the college students who are getting spammed and made uncomfortable by an uncle’s friend request – they will go other places. And it may not be today or in three or six months, but change will occur. Tastemakers are inherently nomads, and I can sense that the innovators (to use Roger’s term) are already out exploring the fringes of what’s next. Perhaps there’s something inherent about “places” – we can only share them so much. And now that Facebook is a place for everyone, and people are acting on this openness, “what’s next” becomes the question.
And so what is next for the innovators, the tastemaking nomads? Well, I’ve got a few ideas, and I’ve seen a few interesting next steps. Open Facebook has forced migration, and the innovators are out exploring a number of potential alternatives, some that don’t resemble “social networking.” But today, I’m not going to blow their cover, so I suppose you’ll just have to keep tuned. ;)
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
