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. ;)
Tags: activation, adoption, facebook, media
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.
Couple thoughts,
1) I really like this 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.”
2) In your Facebook Preferences, you can Turn Up/Turn Down the amount of information gets fed into your News Feed. You can also block people if you don’t want to get updates about them. This allows you to focus on the friends you care most about.
3) I understand the plight of the early adapters and think it is in their nature to keep moving, hence the name. I think the worry over this is overstated because the generation of youngsters growing up with their teachers, parents, uncles etc. on facebook are becoming more used to it and won’t get as testy when their Uncle pokes them.
4) We are moving toward of world of radical transparency. It’s going to be common place for a public figure to a have a long history of photos/blogs etc online from when they were young.
Just curious how recent talk of an IPO will play into this and how Facebook’s revenue stream would transition to selling an API license.
I worry this will not just push away the tastemakers, who as in the last comment are inherently exploring the fringe, but more of the users in this ‘middle’ you mention.
Good post and work.
Isn’t it also the case that early adopters are now coming to be the right age to want privacy settings? Probably a lot of them are like me, and joined in 2005-2006 as college students, and are now moving into social positions where they feel privacy settings to be important. As a college student, I felt no need for privacy settings. Now that I’m going to be a TA, I definitely want them.
Justin, I see this across the board, so the privacy movement isn’t just post-collegians or image-aware people. Its a shuttering/gatekeeping mechanism as well.
To Tom’s point about youngster’s being comfortable with family members being in the network, I respectfully disagree…While the environments in which we socialize change more frequently, our lizard brain changes a lot slower…kids still want to be away from their parents/relatives, and I dont know if that will ever change.
I don’t know if the early adopters will ever move from Facebook- with its clear desire to become an application platform, and much more than a social network. I can see Facebook becoming a central destination. Some sites are never abandoned by early adopters- a good example is Gmail.
Click on my name for my thoughts on Facebook’s future.
It will be interesting to see if a potential IPO affects the early user community. When EBay went public, they faced some backlash from the early users on the site who formed the community that made the site worth so much. It will be exciting to watch how Facebook manages this.
What? Not social networking? What do you mean, what is next? You are killing me!
I felt Facebook had something more–but maybe something is out there, that might do what Gmail did to mail, and steal most of the early adopters away. I just might have too broad a definition of it.
Isn’t this the response you would expect to see from established networks? Don’t established networks always invoke strategies to discourage interlopers?
I can see individuals leaving, but are the networks actually leaving as well? Is the movement out as a group and they are reconvening elsewhere? I’ll look forward to your posts.
Facebook move towards an application oriented platform is an incredibly innovative one. But it seems that the website is now getting messier and messier.
We forgot often that a centralised website for a huge bunch of things is not the right solution, too much things gather in a common layout and a common architecture can’t be more user-friendly than specialized solutions.
Regarding the early-adopters, some of my friends,Facebook users and techno-addicts so to speak, have recently invited me to http://www.6pages.com, a small and recent SNS. I haven’t tested it yet as I’m quite busy but they seem quite eager about it. I guess that the new and hype sides of this website are what they like. I’ll try to get more information in a few weeks time to let you know about the reasons of this choice.
Good post btw ;-)
Why is it everytime I go to this site, somebody is talking about facebook? Is facebook the new unofficial god of the internet social networking world? I doubt it. Most of the people on it are simply to proud or scared to go on other sites like myspace. Get over it guys, there is a whole-nother world out there.
Besides, you gotta realize all of the rules that FB puts on it’s mermebes is so they aren’t viewed as another myspace, a vamped sex-connection.
These guys are early adopters…and it’s actully useful! http://apps.facebook.com/thenewsroom
As someone else mentioned, the people who are actually “early adopters” are people who are no longer youngters. I made my profile much more private than previously because I’m 26 now and I was only 21 or 22 when I adopted an account. It doesn’t bother me if my uncle pokes me because I’m adult enough not to mind interacting with my uncle.
Facebook is getting too cluttered, though…but weirdly, I log on much more now than I used to, because I in fact kind of like some of the applications myself! Since the introduction of the news feed I spend more time on facebook because I’m notified when one of my friends gets in and out of a relationship or engaged or something.
Also, as others have said, you can’t make your friends’ profiles less cluttered, but you can customize how much information is given to you in the news feed.
What an awesome post. I’ll be checking back often. I was an early adopter of thefacebook and can confirm that I’ve significantly restricted my privacy settings. But I’m not sure that I’ll be switching networks anytime soon. I like FB and dislike the hassle of early adoption.