Facebook and the NetHats off to Mark Zuckerberg and the entire team at Facebook. They are managing that most impressive feat of innovating at scale. They are also incredibly ambitious in what they want to accomplish. The goal seems nothing short of one identity and one graph to “rule them all.” With over 400 million users worldwide and a sign on system that is being widely adopted this ambition doesn’t seem crazy. Especially when you layer on top of this the possibility that soon many of these users might have Facebook currency that could be used by sites to implement 1-click purchasing (and by venues to enable RFID based payments via Facebook presence).
But I see at least one flaw with this plan for domination. I simply don’t believe that there is a single social graph that makes sense. I may very well follow someone’s booksmarks on del.icio.us that I don’t want to have any other relationship with. Or take the group of people that I feel comfortable sharing my foursquare checkins with — these are all people I trust and would enjoy if they showed up right there and then. That group in turn is different from the people I work with on Google docs for various projects which is why I would be nervous about using the Microsoft docs connected to Facebook. Trying to shoe-horn all of these into a single graph is unlikely to work well.
As a little historical aside. There is a bit of a personal irony in the huge noise around the Facebook “Like” button. Yahoo could have had this in 2005 following their acquisition of del.icio.us if they had started to promote it to their users and to content sites!
The social graph/access/privacy concern seems very real: Facebook already has more than 30 different switches in their privacy settings, not counting the application-specific settings that often have sharing and privacy implications.
I have to wonder how many Facebook users really understand what information they’re sharing with whom at present, and the situation is only going to get more complex.
Unless Facebook’s users end up taking the path of least resistance and just start shaping their online behavior to fit the service’s friends/FOF/Networks model (which is certainly a possibility), the overhead of trying to figure out who will see what—and how to modify that when necessary—may be demoralizing enough to push a nontrivial amount of user activity elsewhere.
Whitneymcn is spot on and Newsweek brought up a similar point--I've already been pushed elsewhere (or "unplugged" as Newsweek's Tumblrblogger put it).
I've gone through and marked off as much as I can as private (while still allowing status updates to show up) but that's only because I took an active interest in it. It took a lot of effort to find out how to do it. But the thought of them changing things AGAIN pushed me to the point where I hardly ever use the site directly--I only post there via 3rd party services like Ping.fm or Hootsuite. Why invest time and effort learning how and where everything is (privacy settings and everything else) if they're just going to shift everything around AGAIN?
To me, Facebook blew it years ago by being too invasive and (on a more practical level) changing things too dramatically and too often. These two factors (which are linked) made me walk away from 90% of my activity there. I now only go when people comment on things I post there. And if so many friends and family weren't on that site I wouldn't be there.
Facebook isn't a new AOL, as I've heard a few people suggest, it's like America, itself. I'd leave if only everyone I cared about didn't live there. :(
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