

The social network no-one has heard of gets right what Facebook screwed up - bensummers
http://www.winextra.com/archives/the-social-network-no-one-has-heard-of-gets-right-what-facebook-screwed-up/

======
jasonlbaptiste
Facebook actually had it perfect back in the day. Unless you're my friend, you
see nothing but my name and my profile picture. No crazy controls or rocket
science.

~~~
lotharbot
What about the other half of the equation: if you're my friend, you see
everything. Maybe I don't want that. Maybe I want only my closest friends to
see certain information.

~~~
mattrepl
That's what I liked about the old Facebook, there was a deterrent to mass
friending.

------
ivankirigin

      Facebook is constantly pushing the envelope trying to get people to believe that
      they want to share absolutely everything with everyone –
      including the advertisers.
    

Your privacy settings are irrelevant with respect to advertisers. The
targeting means you see ads targeting some aspect of your profile without
advertisers getting your identity. This kind of ignorance in a post about how
a social network should do things makes me stop reading and ignore the rest.

~~~
StevenHodson
excuse me for a second .... it might not be direct sharing with advertisers
but the more that Facebook cons you into sharing the more valuable your
information is to Facebook as a way for advertisers to target their ads. So in
effect the more you share your information with a growing pool of people the
more advertisers gain in the process. It might be indirect but you are still
provide fodder for the marketers and advertisers.

~~~
ivankirigin
The quoted statement is false. You could have everything public, or everything
shared with friends only, and it wouldn't matter with respect to advertisers.

Yes, facebook benefits if you share more on facebook. Similarly, every other
website on the planet benefits more if you use it more.

A common idea is that facebook makes decisions based upon making money from
advertising. Here, the accusation is that facebook is pushing people to be
more public because of advertising money. First, facebook doesn't make
decisions based upon short term monetary gain. Second, this is explicitly
false, as I've already outlined.

------
Ripster
I am not that impressed. It is still very inflexible. The one social network
that no-one has really not heard about is NotePub, and that is also the one
that gets it right, you can just define custom groups of people and can
specify for every bit of information which persons and/or groups can see that
info.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Custom grouping is too hard for the masses, so any social network that relies
on that will continue to be the one nobody has heard about.

The WLN controls are actually a pretty good compromise in that they make it
pretty easy and relatively clear to create the one differentiation that most
people really want: real friends versus acquaintances.

I wish we lived in a world where people actually read the popup dialogs that
popped up in front of them before clicking on "OK"...multiple times (a real
experience that I witnessed that altered my perception of the masses
completely). Unfortunately, we don't, and as the ones building the software,
we have to deal with that (and often suffer when it comes to things like
FaceBook that has has mass-adoption overlap).

~~~
Ripster
I see your point, and agree, well said, but not all social networks/web apps
should aspire to be the next Facebook, some of them should try to do something
different, not necessarily for the masses.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I totally agree. Community has totally been lost in many of these "social"
apps. The best social network I interact with is a motorcycle forum still
running vBulletin.

I think the huge challenge in these sites is that they start off simple and
targeted (like Facebook), then grow, and find they don't have a sane way to
deal with that growth.

Of course, trying to solve it before you need to is just a pointless waste of
time, because odds are very against you ever needing to solve it.

~~~
StevenHodson
I agree with you that some of the best so-called social networks are the old-
style web forums. Having run for a very long time I see more of a 'community'
built around it that any social network and really isn't that what it is all
about - being a part of a community?

------
sabon
I like the irony here:

Take a look at this paragraph.

"As you can see the Windows Live Network have done their best to make the
privacy tools simple and easy to use and yet provide you with a sense of
control over who can see what is happening in your activity streams."

It is just beneath the graph that is absolutely unusable and too hard to
comprehense for well over 90% of the users. If Facebook had such privacy
controls - everybody would bash them for making it overcomplicated.

------
cianestro
It would be interesting if features and the amount of content produced by them
scaled with the frequency of interactivity between contacts. WLN seems to draw
just another arbitrary line. Although it has some flaws, using levels of
shared knowledge in the form of questions to be answered to access content
isn't a bad proposition either.

