InsideFacebook reports on the coming “opening up” of Facebook:
After Facebook’s press event yesterday announcing public profiles and the real-time home page “stream,” I briefly chatted with Mark Zuckerberg about the future of sharing on Facebook. Essentially, Mark said things are headed toward a hybrid model in which some information shared by users can be private and some information shared by users can be public, depending on users’ preferences.
This direction means users will need to think in new ways about sharing on Facebook. Historically, sharing on Facebook has been managed through Facebook’s robust privacy settings, with most of the default settings being set relatively strictly (usually limiting access to most information to others in your school or regional networks). Now, Facebook users will also have the option to easily share some information much more openly – even completely publicly for the whole world (and search engines) to see if they so choose.
While Zuckerberg said Facebook is still working on the user interface that would make such sharing settings robust and easy to use, these changes are going to have significant implications for the nature of sharing on Facebook.
Perhaps. One of the stories that doesn’t get talked about much is the massive shift towards privacy in Facebook in the last few years. In studies I’ve run, and in data I’ve seen, there is (and has been) a clear migration towards friends-only profiles in Facebook. In my opinion, this is the result of 1) increased awareness and comprehension of privacy risks 2) context collapse and 3) the aggressive nature by which Facebook manages the community. As I’ve written previously, Facebook’s users have adapted to this new reality, and accordingly enforce a high level of information control. We’ve studied online community long enough to know that users won’t change practice simply because the community has new features. To that extent, we shouldn’t expect Facebook’s move towards openness to radically affect the community.
I see this move as the death of regional networks. Facebook’s initial genius was to segment schools by network. Schools are unique; they are closed communities full of individuals who interact daily, who share a strong common bond. Because of this very strong group identification, Facebook users felt comfortable sharing and disclosing to other members of their school network. When Facebook opened to everyone, they attempted to replicate this success by introducing regional networks. As one might imagine, regional networks are vastly different from school networks. There is no verification for entry, the networks are much larger and much less cohesive, and the group effects are meaningless. Regional networks were simply an arbitrary segmentation so Facebook could keep up the master-plan nature of its community.
Fast-forward to 2009, and a few things have changed. Primarily, lots of people have Facebook accounts. Unlike college students who are heavily focused on interacting in their local, university network, older users operate without a focus on location or geography. You don’t care about what network Bob from First Grade uses, because the nature of interaction isn’t about browsing Bob’s profile – it is about establishing a friend connection. For older users, Facebook is much more about point-to-point use than browsing interaction (and if anyone wants to lament the “devaluing” of Friendship, they should consider how the system forces people into friendship to accomplish informational goals). This nature of interaction has largely rendered regional networks and their privacy functions meaningless.
This takes us back to the original question – will all this new openness radically affect Facebook? No. Facebook’s contexts collapsed a long time ago. Facebook is already open. Users factor this openness into what they say and do, who they friend, and the privacy settings they maintain. Sure, publicity seekers will like this new openness, but there may be a reverse incentive for other users. This semi-openness may make users more findable, forcing more awkward friendship negotiations and context collapse, leading to reduced sharing of information (the lifeblood of Facebook). This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of Facebook, but just as a reflection of the social realities of a massive online system with real-world implications. If everyone in the world was on the same listserv we’d behave the same way.
Upsides for Facebook? This is a great chance to become a huge peer content-distribution network. Take photo galleries. If Facebook stepped their game up a little in photo galleries (hosting multiple size photos, offering printing services, etc), it could easily compete into the territory of Flickr, Kodak or Snapfish (Note: Why FB, with their 11 Trillion photos, hasn’t done this meaningfully yet is beyond me). There are many valuable products that Facebook could provide via the public profile, any number of which are monetizable and provide real value (i.e. not just network value). This would mark a serious legitimization of Facebook as a business – sort of like an inverse Google. In the case of Google, you spread yourself over all of their services. With Facebook, the individual would be the center of the network, and their profile could be a place for search, hosting, file sharing, chat/videochat, photo hosting, blogging, microblogging, and so forth. As unglamorous as it sounds, there is still a huge market to be people’s webpage.
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.
holy crap, 11 trillion photos?
Many things about what you wrote — let me bullet-point (Oh, when my former consultant self comes back, that’s bad):
* Thanks for pointing at that press conference;
* Thank you so much for your analysis — and the word context collapse (I had a hard time translating the idea to English);
* I’m personnally glad of that move: I want to share the academics links I enjoy with the world, but not all my information, and revised control should improve that;
* Regarding the rest of us: studies conducted at my lab (SocioGeek, in French, translation project on their way, more information available upon request; and yes, there are tons of methodological issues) doesn’t show more privacy as much as more control, and ‘Friends only’ in pretty much the only control Facebook has been suggesting; a significant portion of people tend to know about it; many more are interested, and might neglect the complexity of the thing: Facebook offering better suited control (by context of activity element rather then type of media) would certainly be welcome, and increase users’ management, both opening and closing;
* Don’t use “Open”: it’s so polysemic, that it’s border-line tautological: is Facebook encouraging sharing with other Facebook member (the usual meaning of ‘Public’) or making available to any site, through RSS feeds that do not need the hardly implemented authentification process?
* More generally —as I’ve been arguing for more then two months now, up to a seminar Wednesday at the OII— any “opening up” by Facebook (short of DiSo, i.e. letting befrend people from other SNS without opening a account there) will lead to a larger market share for them: all this provides great convenience for users, but those short-term; unless Facebook accepts to release that control and let non-members intefer (and based on their business model, I doubt they will — at least, not without a fight bigger then any other previously seen) the site is headed for massive monopoly head-aches.
Fred, I think you covered the points and expected affects well. Overall I think a small portion of Facebook users will make optimal use of the new features (unless Facebook makes a gross error is setting the defaults for the options). I suspect most users are content with building their networks via the friends-of-friends method or via their email-contacts list; is there any research that would support the idea that a lot of users find these methods too constraining?
Also, you state “there is (and has been) a clear migration towards friends-only profiles in Facebook”, which I also believe to be true, but do you, or do you know of anyone, who has collected hard statistics to support that?
Sure. One survey I ran at UNC last fall (employing SRS), as well as a student honors thesis. Of stuff already in print, see:
Lampe, C., Ellison, N. B., and Steinfield, C. (2008). Changes in use and perception of facebook. In CSCW ‘08: Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, New York, NY, USA, 2008 (pp. 721-730). ACM.
Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., and Christakis, N. (2008). The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(1), 79-100.