

How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126084637203791583.html

======
martian
"We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the
same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a
place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and
bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place
for intimacy with friends."

Shame, that privacy and intimacy (plus the voyeurism that ensued) is what made
FB so popular in the first place.

And from my [limited, anecdotal] experience, the people who use Facebook the
most are talking with their grandmas and cousins, and have little to gain from
mass public exposure. (I'd really like to have numbers about this to back up
my observation.)

~~~
unalone
The good thing about Facebook is that as quick as they are to fuck up, they're
even quicker at recognizing when users are pissed off and fixing themselves.
They're even smart enough to differentiate between "Users don't like change"
and "We really did an oopsie"; they've uncannily predicted which of their
controversial changes would become more popular with time.

I don't know if this one'll make them change, though. Most people don't really
want privacy anymore. My kneejerk, unthoughtout bet would be on their making
it easy upon registration to decide on a blanket privacy policy. Make it easy
for people to clamp up again but maintain the public status quo. Everybody's
happy.

~~~
andymism
_Most people don't really want privacy anymore_

I agree on that one. Even though large groups of users scream about and sign
petitions regarding Facebook's changing privacy policies, I'm convinced most
users don't really care about how public their wall-to-wall conversations,
photos, etc. get. I'd argue that if 100, 200, or 300 'friends' can see what
you're posting on Facebook, it might as well be completely public. Facebook
isn't making friending obsolete, users are.

------
koko775
If you take a step back and look at what Facebook is trying to do, it makes
sense. They have never been about the advertisers or the users or the
developers exclusively: their mission is to attain and represent the social
graph which exists in the real world, on their servers. This is why they have
both Facebook applications as well as Facebook Connect. Whereas apps brings
people in to the site and earns ad revenue, Connect allows users to interact
with websites in a socially relevant way without Facebook participating in ad
revenue. If framed from an advertising perspective, it would seem that they
are hurting themselves by competing with themselves. From a developer point of
view, their API can give useful information but does not go far enough. From a
user point of view, they want people to feel safe interacting with friends but
they also want them to expose more of themselves.

To me, none of these facts make sense until you frame it as measures to make
the social graph more pervasive. And it's that pervasiveness, IMO, that will
guarantee Facebook's success, because it's too attractive to advertisers,
developers, and users for any to truly abandon it.

P.S. Facebook's definitely not in a bad position financially. I'm pretty sure
the terms of my NDA (I was an intern there this summer) preclude me from
discussing it further, but its finances have been stable for quite some time
now.

P.P.S. Article is bullshit, just restrict posts you want to be intimate,
that's the idea of Per-Object Privacy. It can improve, to be sure, but that's
not the point.

------
jchonphoenix
The major problem with facebook is that they really don't care much about
their users. I know enough friends that work there to know that they believe
users will just "deal" and eventually get used to the new way of doing things.

~~~
philwelch
Every minor redesign causes about a week of angry outrage that eventually goes
away. I think Facebook has good empirical evidence that users _will_ just deal
and eventually get used to the new way of doing things.

~~~
EnderMB
As someone that uses Facebook on a daily basis I can definitely agree with you
on that one. In reality users haven't lost a lot of privacy and most users are
moaning over nothing. To me this is a good move as a lot of people seem to be
moving over to Twitter because it allows them to be more vocal and social.
Everyone I know (that'd be two people) that isn't happy with these new changes
has just changed their profile back.

------
hristov
Of course we should take this with a grain of salt, because the Wall Street
Journal is owned by the same company that owns Facebook's major competitor
myspace. But of course the author is a responsible news corp. journalist, so
she honestly disclosed the possible conflict of interest... Hahaha, just
kidding.

Well, it is a given that whenever facebook stumbles and falls, the entire News
Corp. media empire will be there to kick it in the crotch, but Zuckenberg has
to take some of the blame for stumbling in the first place. Those privacy
setting updates were a really really bad idea, and he should have reversed
them as soon as he saw the negative blow back.

------
chrischen
A new social network for private networking will popup to fill the void
facebook is leaving, just as facebook originally filled the need when myspace
was at its peak.

I don't understand why facebook can't just keep doing what made it popular.
The fact that it was a closed network for only _real_ people you knew, not
random internet "friends". Why follow in the footsteps of twitter when you
already have something useful. I stopped using facebook once my friends list
grew into the hundreds, trying to open it up even more is probably going to
result in less usage.

~~~
derefr
> I stopped using facebook once my friends list grew into the hundreds

Why didn't you just _remove_ friends and then _keep_ using it? That's like
saying you gave up on using email because of all the unanswered messages you
had sitting in your inbox.

~~~
unalone
In three years of using Facebook, I've _never_ had a friend delete an account.
Not once. And it's the only site beyond Hacker News on which I keep a
consistent account. (I wouldn't keep a consistent account here if deleting
myself was permitted.)

But I'm edgy and avante-garde and so I _did_ disable my Facebook account for
two days. Restored it almost instantly. It's not that there's an addiction,
it's that Facebook is so easy to bend to your needs that outright deletion is
stupid.

I removed all but ten friends and suddenly Facebook is a way of talking to
friends and being vulnerable and the whole shebang. I've got no complaints.
Literally none.

------
tokenadult
"(Recall that despite being the fifth most popular Web site in the world,
Facebook is barely profitable.)"

That's a crucial point about Facebook's business model. It can't generate
enough revenue yet to provide satisfactory server response consistently (as I
have again discovered today).

"(Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take
down their profile picture to protect their privacy"

Where is the link to that statement? Doesn't it degrade Facebook's value (as
against MySpace) if Facebook becomes the place to be fake? Well, indeed, that
becomes the conclusion of the author of the submitted article, that Facebook
becomes no longer a place to behave like one is among friends now that
Facebook is desperate to monetize.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Having lived through the dotcom bubble, I know very well the terrible danger
of runaway popularity. For a while Facebook was positively awash in Kool-Aid
-- remember when they were going to be the next Microsoft and every
application in the world was going to run primarily on their platform?

That's dangerous. The problem with bubbles is that they distort your view of
reality. You do crazy things, like build out a big company with big
infrastructure that is out of proportion to your primary use case. Or chase
other people's business models instead of your own because you become addicted
to the glare of the relentlessly-moving spotlight.

If, indeed, Facebook can't provide privacy while staying in business, that's a
very exciting piece of business news. It means that somebody else -- one site,
two sites, hundreds of sites, perhaps something that doesn't look like a
_site_ at all -- is going to inherit Facebook's use case, the one that built
their business: socializing with a select group of friends without excessive
privacy concerns. [1]

To work, fellow nerds!

\---

[1] Yeah, I know, little or nothing that you type can ever be guaranteed to be
truly private. Digital data is too hard to hide and too easy to spread. I
strive not to type anything that would _kill_ me if it were cited all over the
place. But there's value in the difference between "something that a private
detective or a spy can learn without too much work" and "something that the
Googlebot will index seconds after you write it". And that value is going to
be worth money to someone, even if Facebook is tempted or compelled to turn
away from it.

~~~
ALee
Perhaps the protocol of e-mail will soon be getting its day again.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Its day has never really left. But there is certainly a reason why all my
Facebook-using peers have flocked to Facebook as well.

