Fred StutzmanThoughts about information, social networks, and privacy

Fred Vogelstein has an interesting article in the new edition of Wired, previewing Facebook’s full-on assault of Google for targeted advertising territory.  The article makes news, and includes some great (and painfully ironic quotes) from Mark Zuckerberg in which he accuses Google of contributing to the surveillance society (Pot, Kettle, Black).  The article reads like a preview for the Super Bowl, with notoriously tight-lipped executives tossing bombs back and forth.  Congrats to Vogelstein for successfully stoking the ire of these monoliths.

The fundamental conflict of the article lies in the comparison of the advertising products offered by the two companies.  Google’s product, targeted text ads, is the single most successful product on the Internet.  The tiny, unobstructive ads have fueled Google’s dominance in multiple markets; today, 90% of Google’s revenue comes from Adsense.  Facebook’s product is nascent – it is the concept that advertising works better when it is socially mediated.  That is, we are more likely to click on ads, content, and links when the content is funneled through our friends.  This theory is sensible, but to date, Facebook’s concept remains vaporware, with a majority of their revenue coming through traditional targeted text and banner campaigns.

Framed by Zuckerberg, the contrast between Facebook and Google is personal vs. impersonal.  Of Google he states: “You have a bunch of machines and algorithms going out and crawling the Web and bringing information back.  That only gets stuff that is publicly available to everyone. And it doesn’t give people the control that they need to be really comfortable.”  Vogelstein writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

Personal vs. impersonal.  Wouldn’t you rather get a doctor recommendation from ten of your friends than a text link?  The value of peer recommendations have driven many communities, including countless bulletin boards and fora, sites like epinions and Yelp, and members-only specialist communities.  The fundamental problem with monetization in Facebook’s case lies with norms that govern the exchange of advice, particularly that the advice be truthful and unbiased.  If we are to trust advice, we must know that external agents aren’t corrupting or influencing the transmission of advice.  We can get advice from Facebook regrading doctors, but we won’t trust the advice if Facebook pays our friends to recommend certain doctors.

Facebook’s grand vision involves a wholly-contained world of social information that is brokered out through the web.  With enough critical mass, it is argued, most of our common information needs can be answered by our social networks.  With most technological main effect hypotheses, the formulation is generally suspect.  Researchers of social support argue that support is more effectively derived from certain actors, that support is contextual, etc.  In a traditional model, where the people around you are the primary producers of information, your personal support network is crucial.  With the advent of the Internet, however, most of us no longer exist in a traditional model where the people around us are our only support vector (1).

The reality is that Google, and other search engines, have restructured expectations regarding everyday information seeking.  It is no longer good enough to simply get recommendations from a personal network when there is a vast quantity of electronic information available at one’s fingertips.  You can certainly get doctor recommendations from your friends, but the online search for information about the doctor is now a natural part of the information seeking process.  In this sense, Facebook is complementary, providing an important but not all-encompassing factor in our decision making process.  The argument that individuals will move their information seeking to a social network, and away from the mechanistic site Google simply assumes too much.  Google has already won by making itself an integral part of our everyday information seeking processes.

If Facebook (a proxy for “socially mediated search”) is a complementary and useful part of everyday information seeking, we must consider the relevance of information we get from the site.  We generally assess relevance in information systems through “recall” and “precision.”  In Facebook, recall is strictly bound to our known social world – the people who we have connected with.  Therefore, precision is a function of how well the various others producing results match our needs.  If you have 500 friends, spaced across a variety of age ranges, is it safe to assume that information you get from the network will actually be all that relevant?  Our core social networks are generally homophilous, but our core social networks are very small.  Expand past a certain network size and it becomes likely the interests and experience of your “friends” will vary significantly from yours.

Facebook could address this problem with friend lists, the privacy feature that compels individuals to place their friends in groups.  Perhaps friend lists could be converted to interest groups (People whose book recommendations I trust), but the mechanics of a process would require a good bit of intervention on behalf of the user.  The participation gap is also problematic – if the people who you really trust for book recommendations are not heavy users of Facebook, then it is unlikely you’ll have your information needs addressed.

Facebook could develop algorithms that look for similarity between question askers and answerers – if I ask for a book recommendation, perhaps Facebook could weight responses from people who share my stated book tastes.  This compels participation and broadcast of information, one of Michael Zimmer’s new laws of social networking.

Although the debate framed by Vogelstein and Zuckerberg is Facebook vs. Google, there is actually very little opportunity for Facebook to significantly edge into Google’s core market – targeted text-link ads.  Text link ads are served as a by-product of information search, which is an integral part of our everyday information seeking processes.  Facebook is likely to emerge as a complement to search, and in some areas it may perform better than search, but search will remain relevant.  The challenge to Facebook is to find a way to monetize their value areas without being in contravention of social norms.  The challenge to Google is to get access to the wealth of personal data Facebook is collecting (and no, Google Friend Connect and all of their other terrifically lame social products, will solve this problem).  For the consumer, the battle between Google and Facebook is a win-win, with the obvious exception of privacy matters.

(1) Those with “impoverished life-worlds” – those with limited access to information and resources, are unlikely to incorporate search engines or social networks into their everyday information search processes.