Facebook enters the age of accidental oversharing
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
One person posts a picture and a friend comments on it, then mutual friends (such as those who are oddly curious about the poster of the picture or someone in it) can take a quick glimpse at that person's life. This is rewarded by the brain with a small shot of dopamine.
This is a function not of the social graph itself (friend) but of the addictive nature of the fleeting glimpses it allows people to have of others.
Suppose you have 500 friends who each have several hundred friends. Some subset of those friends constitutes your "fascination graph". Maybe you think they are hot, maybe you aspire to their lifestyle, maybe you hated them in high school, etc. etc.
In order to continue to succeed, Facebook (and app makers) have to realize that it's not the mundane behaviors of your Facebook friends that are interesting... it's the allure of those on the fascination graph that generates the dopamine and the slot machine-addict kind of clicking that is gold to advertisers.
Facebook has managed to deliver this dopamine in a way that's not creepy (nobody has to go through anyone's garbage, etc.) so the question is, is it ever going to start to seem creepy?
> It makes no sense being all semantic about it
Does it really not? Look, you're commenting on an article which states that Facebook leaks our privacy. Don't you happen to notice that it does so because everyone is considered a friend? This ambiguity and lack of precision in defining the personal relationship to people you are in contact with, coupled with simply assuming by default that everyone's your trusted friend and can be given access to the most private details of your life is exactly what causes "privacy leaks". It's a social mechanism, and granted - if every user were to set up his privacy options in the perfect way - they wouldn't be happening. But we're only human, and on many levels, some of them subconscious, it's difficult for us to keep in mind that a friend may, in fact, not be a friend.
It's funny when you think about it, in the earlier years, you had the network search tool. Basically all profiles were public and you could search based on age, country, gender, university... everything. I could literally narrow down searches to people on a street. Was it really more private then? No? Then what changed? At what point will privacy be fulfilled and can one really call it a social network at that point?
There is Diaspora, if privacy is really what users want then, why haven't we seen a massive conversion to Diaspora?
While I agree that privacy is not "really what users want", the lack of a massive conversion to Diaspora is not indicative of anything. There was an article a week or two ago where an investor pointed out that Facebook is a natural monopoly. What they were talking about is basically that, now that most people are on Facebook, they're not going to pick up and walk out for another social network.
You might. Your friends might. But you post on HN, too.
Users are generally right, it doesn't matter in most cases. No harm is being done... yet.
The general trend is toward services that do not make privacy optional and that require the users to accept a narrower range data collection and advertisement policies in order to use the service.
In time (maybe in 5-10 years) getting on the internet will require accepting terms that basically give up lots of privacy and anonymity. (My other prediction is that we'll see the return of interruption ads that cannot be skipped for nearly all content, or every 7 or 8 minutes during a typical internet usage setting).
The above is why investors are paying so much money for shares of Google and Facebook. Both are a combination of internet gatekeeper and data collector. Both are awaiting the right moment so they can enter the "last mile" business. In the meantime, the fact that users don't care is just gravy.
Incidentally, the most relevant consequence of this in today's world is that both firms are happy to do whatever powerful governments want. Facebook and Google are destined to become the next Halliburton and Ratheon as cyber warfare and terrorism loom large as threats to security and government finds itself horribly data-poor compared to private firms.
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. If we, the startup community, can't figure out a way of being transparent about our intentions with user's personal information in a way that makes sense to them, we will suffer a backlash. We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a social online society.
This has already started to some extent as people become more aware of the risks of oversharing (as pointed out in the article) but it could quickly become more pervasive.
And? While this might scare the sizable portion of HN readers who have money staked on social, I would see this as a net positive.
EDIT: No but really, besides the Arab Spring social media has spammed the world with cute cat pictures and eaten away at the blogosphere. The portions eaten away are subsumed into one of the competing walled gardens. The web wasn't designed to be an echo chamber.
FB shouldn't allow that in the first place.
Instead, I have to agree to install it, then go to my privacy settings, then remove its permission to auto-share.
Nowadays I just refuse to install apps.
I blocked Deezer from sharing my music, and the website pop a little message every time i launch a song, asking "Do you want to share on your timeline"
Source : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...
The example I speak of is Digsby. I saw some of my friends had postings from Digsby on their wall, with "achievements" like sending 100,000 messages etc. I didn't want that, so when I installed Digsby I unchecked that option. Consequence: Digsby would randomly boot me out of Facebook Chat and not allow me to log back in. I had to remove it from my Facebook apps list, re-login, and turn off wall postings within the Digsby app itself rather than Facebook's permission management.
That's the kind of thing that irritates me.
Had Facebook taken the path of not fucking around with privacy settings, I might be more open to Facebook's apps. However their intentions are clear, given events such as: automatically opting in to new email alerts even through I've disabled all other Facebook e-mail alerts, continually changing the privacy settings page resulting in the removal of past privacy options, allowing "friends" to add me to groups I wish to be no part of, un-hiding comments to my page which I have marked as either spam or offensive, and so on.
The end result is a Facebook which I use to look at photos and tell girls to Skype me and not much else. While I may notice these things right as they happen, for other non-technical users their happiness with Facebook slowly erodes away and they can't quite pin point it.
As Facebook continues to add more and more "noise", the chances of a competitor being able to beat Facebook at their own game increases.
While the analogy may be overused, albeit in a different manner, Google was able to beat Yahoo not only because it was a better search engine but because it had a lot less noise. While Facebook appears to be the Google of social networking, the sheer amount of "noise" in my news feed tells me otherwise.
(A note for users of both Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, etc: the amount of "noise" you produce is directly relational to how much people whose ideas matter pay attention to you. The friends who are over sharing get blocked from my Facebook news feed. The Twitter users that tweet about their cat grooming habits are un-followed. And so on. I am extremely cautious what gets posted to my feed, and when it does, people remember what I posted.)
It's so f'ing annoying that you can't even follow a link (like anything on Yahoo) without installing the app. I just do a separate Google search for the story title instead of installing the app. At some point there is less sharing going on. I'm more likely NOT to check out what my friend read because of this.
My girlfriend recently discovered that professional contacts here in a foreign country could look her up on F'book from behind their desks and see pictures from her college days during their meeting.
Should she have turned her photos private earlier on? YES
Did Facebook give her any indication they were so open? NO. In fact Facebook changed their settings numerous times and each time left different defaults.
Now she had to go through and make numerous settings changes, and each time she didn't really know how things looked to a non-friend logged into Facebook.
Ultimately I think she had to manually make EVERY album private to friends only.
Seriously if I wasn't so locked into Facebook I would be so out of there. Bastards have really abused our trust.
As an example, I no longer use Socialcam or Viddy after they defaulted to "frictionless sharing". They got a really nice spike from it, but it cost them my trust.
That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will put something on their wall.
If Facebook had any sense they'd force the API to ask permission and show the user what will be posted before it will do so. Maybe then people would be more likely to use Facebook login and give them that network effect advantage they're after.
You and your tech savvy friends are not "most people". Most people don't know and don't care.
They've been trying to sell users on sharing everything, but people want to share things on their own terms. Google understood (hopefully they still do) this, facebook doesn't.
How can they do really great things with user data when the default attitude of their users is "I don't trust them with my data"? ... its a trick question ... they can't.
There's a reason why they say "You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once".
Will be fun to watch them try though.
Thus, less experienced developers and lesser known companies follow the path these companies take and believe that this is how the Open Graph should be. There are many questions on Stack Overflow or the Facebook developers group from people inexperienced asking how to make articles automatically read when users arrive at their site (the news.read action).