Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who created a startup around a hashtags search engine (1), I'm very glad of this development from a business point of view - the more hashtags are used, the better.

As I already wrote (2), though, I'm not sure if this is a great move for Facebook in the long run. Facebook owns the incredibly compelling core expectation of "easily sharing with friends and family through the Internet". But, for obvious reasons, public posts and comments are preferable for advertising purposes, so Facebook is also trying to eat Twitter's pie.

Problem is, can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on? My guess is that you can't, and if this move really succeeds - which is entirely possible - this could be the start of the end of FB's domination of the "privately sharing" space - which is less easily monetized, but much more compelling than the "publicly sharing" one.

(1) http://hashtagify.me

(2) http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...

EDIT: some corrections

> can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on?

This remains to be seen. They have been working on it just in a really crash, burn and restart process way. Mark Zuckerberg once went through two options for public discourse

* create a Facebook fan page

* open his personal profile to public

The first attempt was silently killed (from what I can see, this is my assumption) and now redirects to his personal page (www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg -> www.facebook.com/zuck). The second attempt, well, as you can see from his profile, it is pretty much closed up now.

Private sharing, as least from the friends I have, has been going on pretty frequently, just not on the timeline

* private groups

* group messages

With messages, it seems Facebook is testing inline message (1) along the status composer (on the homepage) which aligns with the thinking that they are making private sharing less restrictive to action on while maintaining "privacy" (in quotes, as some may not agree to the level of privacy offered)

I have no data to back up how effective private sharing is though.

(1) http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/02/facebook-status-composer-me...

Good points, but how many people really use private groups? Aren't your friends more technically able than most people?

Personally, I connected to a lot of people of facebook for political discussions, and in the end that detracted a lot from the effectiveness of FB as a mean to stay connected with my family and closer friends...

> "My guess is that you can't..."

Why would you guess that you can't be that place? Personally, it would make much more sense to have a place where I share all my stories and then choose whether it should be for the public or just personal (like how it's currently done with Facebook). That makes more sense to me than having two separate sites to share public vs personal, as long as there is still the aspect that personal DOES, indeed, stay personal.

There are two problems. The first, most obvious one is that of clutter (not to say spam). The more public updates are in your feed, the less space there is for your personal - and more important - ones. Granted, there are solutions to this problem (groups), but how many people are even able to use them?

The second, more subtle - but more fundamental IMHO - one is that of Facebook's brand. If this succeeds, it will inevitably be diluted. In the long run, this could open the space to some competitor who focuses completely on the private space. This is difficult due to network effects, but not at all impossible.

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