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I wish I could upvote you twice as this is the essence of what 'normal' people do not understand and the internet gurus do: no big social network can survive without selling out it's user base in some sort. The rest is just mechanics.

I would say giving information to Facebook is giving information to the world. No profile means no information for anyone to refer to you which means no one can bother screwing you in any way. Oh...and you also realize that there is a sun out there and the grass is green and actually it does have a smell.

In case you have profiles up on the internet (not just FB) share only what you are comfortable to loose. Once in different hands it is not yours anymore.

"What I do believe is that they are interested in getting more users, sharing more information, and making more money."

I don't see why sharing more information will make more money in the long term. Keeping the users happy and engaged would seem more profitable to me. What is the logic?

"In fact, as Facebook gets more users, the quality of facebook will continue to decline, as will their treatment of those users."

I don't understand why treating the users badly would increase the value of the company.

This is an obtuse argument. The obvious point being made by the parent is that Facebook, as all companies do, will at some point or another put its own interests above those of its users. When you're selling widgets this is usually no big thing and you just start to fade away or have to reinvent yourself, but when you deal in personal information it's a different story.

as wmeredith replied below and I'll elaborate here:

Facebook has only one product, information. When companies want to grow, they have to produce more product. Facebook can produce more product in only three ways: getting more users, getting users to add more info, or sharing more of the info they've already added. There is no other way.

When new user accounts plateau, when users are content with the amount of info they've added or the additional value of that data declines due to signal-to-noise, the only method they have left is to share more of the information they already have in the form of greater public visibility.

Remember, Facebook's customers are not the users, they are the advertisers. If you want to establish a relationship with a company designed to make profit, profit should be the foundation of the relationship. Facebook's users do not profit. They provide labor to improve the value of facebook with no compensation in return, so the relationship is unbalanced. Even factory workers are paid, albeit not much comparatively, but someone else somewhere is making less and will migrate to the factory to fill jobs people quit.

In facebook's case, turnover can't be filled. The people won't come back and there is a diminishing quantity of new users to pick from. Eventually, users will stop joining because the knowledge we are sharing here will reach them before they do and they'll have lost their naive innocence -- a requirement of any sharecropper.

Why more sharing of information will make more money is because money is made through the information. Basically, advertisers can better target ads. By treating users badly, I mean in an increasingly selfish manner by doing things their users don't appreciate. Users don't want someone unilaterally deciding how much of their, what they consider, private information is shown to third parties -- millions of other parties -- like the FBI, Police, IRS, potential employers.

Facebook's users do not profit. They provide labor to improve the value of facebook with no compensation in return, so the relationship is unbalanced.

I think this is demonstrably false. It's true, my brother doesn't get paid by Facebook to spend time on the site. Google doesn't pay me to use GMail either, and yet I use it every day all day. Money isn't the only way to provide value. And there's no way Facebook could have reached 400 million users without providing value to a lot of those people.

I agree that in the short term FaceBook could turn its current information content into money by disclosing it in ways that will displease the people who create the content. And it is possible that foolish management of the company could make this happen. But there seems to be a long term destruction of the value of the company in doing that because the content creators will migrate to more pleasant sites. The current information content of FaceBook is a fixed resource that will lose value over time. What they need is to have people continually adding new content. Otherwise their visitors will decline and their advertisers will have no audience.

just fyi, they operate around 30.000 servers http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-...

So the future of Facebook is Myspace? It'll grow and decline in quality until one day some small upstart that goes back to the basics of social networking will take the crown; and the history will repeat itself. Unless of course in the future with cheaper processing power, storage space, and bandwidth it will not be as expensive to maintain a very large social network.

That facebook's concern for its users' privacy is secondary to more "practical" matters has been clear for some time now--though perhaps most evident with Zuckerberg's memorable, "privacy can no longer be an expectation." And this recognition is not limited to HN-types and "internet gurus." General users, college students especially, also realize this and so a pattern has developed in which younger users (speaking from the perspective of a college student) exercise a degree of caution (probably less than sufficient) while in college and then upon entry into the workforce, remove the wall, photos from their profile and thus their facebook profiles becomes little more than a prettier linkedin. If this pattern reflects more than just my experiences, Facebook seems poised to be your online passport at the expense of its capabilities as a social communication hub.