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.
