How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete | Hacker News Reader

How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete

online.wsj.com

40 pointsgrellas28 comments

"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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

By design, i guess it's just not encouraged. Frankly I just don't want to say no to people. And facebook is designed so that it's easy to find people you know, even remotely. I need a passive system that fits my needs.

Plus there are other ways I keep in touch with my closer circle of friends: instant messaging.

The other benefit with that is that when I say something, it isn't pushed to everyone else. Even if I delete friends, conversations will still be open.

Interesting. I'd second that. More to come.

"(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.

are you sure that's not just engineering? twitter went through a period like that, and iirc facebook rolled their own scalability solution, maybe they're working a few kinks.

Facebook management is going in the complete wrong direction. They are trying to generate more revenue per user rather than trying to make the user happy. They are treating the advertisers like the customers. The users are the important customers. It is very short sighted.

The important customers are always the ones who pay the bills, in this case that'd be the advertisers, not the users. This should be obvious, without being able to pay the bills there is no service at all.

What if they charged each user $1 per month? I would pay that if it means I don't have to worry about my communication, photos, etc. being resold to others.

I'd say they'd lose a ton of users. People are fickle and have become accustomed to free, they'll switch to whomever offers free service.

Agreed, but for a slightly different reason. I often find the inconvenience of very small payments online to be more annoying than the payment itself.

The important customers are always the ones who pay the bills, in this case that'd be the advertisers, not the users.

I think that is the fundamental point about Facebook's business model. The Facebook view is that the customers of Facebook are

a) advertisers,

b) third-party application developers,

and

c) whoever else has corporate-size bankrolls to fund Facebook.

Regular users are mere eyeballs to count to draw in the actual customers to Facebook. It has been an interesting free ride to be on Facebook, and I DO spend a lot of time there recently since I figured out how to use posted links to stimulate interesting conversations among my varied circles of friends who have never met one another. But I don't see how Facebook can be profitable in the genuine, investor-satisfying meaning of "profitable" without becoming very annoying to most users. Good luck to anyone who can succeed in providing Facebook-level service and making an honest day's wage, but so far the model is still not making sense.

(disclaimer: former intern this past summer)

That is not at all how management views it. They are not at all emphasizing revenue; they are engineering-driven, not business-driven, and their engineers are driving the company, not just the management.

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!

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[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.

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

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

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.

This is a well made point. The difference between what can be learned and what can be learned easily/through happenstance is very significant.

It is hard to hide something form some truly determined to find it out, but that is very different from broadcasting it to the world.

Lying is actually against Facebook's ToS. Just called them out on it here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/15/facebook-lie-terms-of-s...

I think they're making a lot of mistakes and are going to hurt a lot of users. But ultimately they'll make a lot more money.

I think you're conflating "can't" and "won't". They have not been focused on driving revenue up; if this were a company goal they could have done a lot more sales. They acquire sales of advertisements in different ways, and if they really wanted more money, they could have pumped cash into expanding their sales force to do a lot of heavy lifting. However, their eye is on making that sort of sales unnecessary through producing an ads platform that people can go to directly instead.

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