Inside Facebook

As expected, Facebook has officially opened the site to anyone on the planet.

However, the rules governing whose profiles you can view haven’t changed. As I wrote before,

I’m sure the first thing people will do is compare Facebook to MySpace. However, unlike MySpace, Facebook has pretty good privacy controls in place that a reasonable number of people use. New people will only be able to see others in their geographical network. So unless college students join geographical networks in addition to their college networks, they should still be inaccessible to the random searcher.

Facebook is obviously trying to do a better job communicating changes to its 10 million college users than it did with its botched news feed launch.

Here’s the full “How this expansion affects you” message, which was shown to every Facebook user starting this morning:

Now you can get all your friends on Facebook—people who couldn’t get on before because their schools didn’t offer email addresses, because they went to work instead of college, because they graduated before Facebook even existed, or for any other reason. They can join regional networks and see other people in those networks.

Facebook’s network structure is really important in making this expansion possible. The network structure means that the only people who can see your profile are your confirmed friends and the people in your networks. All college, high school, and work networks are authenticated networks, so they are exclusive to the people in them. This means that new people in a regional network can’t see your information unless you are in that same regional network. If you have added a regional network, you can restrict who can see your profile, or remove that network affiliation.

We already give you tight privacy controls, and with this expansion we’ve added even more. You can prevent new users from seeing you, and you can control what they can see about you on the site through some of our new search privacy controls that we added last week.

If new regional users cannot authenticate through an email address, we prompt them to authenticate through a mobile phone number. This makes sure that they are real people.

People who don’t verify their mobile number will be presented with security tests—the word-in-a-box images—whenever they attempt to message, poke, or add another person as a friend. These tests can be read by people, but not computers. This means that anyone getting through these tests is a real person.

We’ve added “Report” links in many places around the site. We’ve been using these for some time to let you help monitor the site. Some people already try to abuse the site, so when users report something, we follow up on it and quickly take it down if it violates our Terms of Service. This has worked well; so if you see something suspicious, offensive, or inappropriate, please report it.

We are putting as many controls in as possible and are always looking for new ways to protect our users from spam and inappropriate behavior. Remember that you control what you do on the site, including whom you add as a friend, and what information you make visible to the people around you.

According to the Wall Street Journal today Yahoo is in talks to potentially acquire Facebook (again). Facebook has had lots of talks over the past year with large media and tech companies.

Mark Zuckerberg got a lot of crap in the piece for not being willing to get out of bed to do a US $200 million ad deal with Microsoft (literally) and for being inaccessible when he’s hanging out with his girlfriend.

Also see: TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb

In the beginning, Facebook was only accessible to students at a few elite schools. As it grew, it opened its doors to everyone in college. Then to everyone in high school. Then to everyone in a company. All in all, it was a very successful user acquisition strategy.

Now, with nearly 10 million members and near total penetration of the college market, unrestricted access to Facebook is coming soon.

According to AdAge,

“Whenever we’ve opened our network, our existing members have reacted negatively, even though they’ve always adjusted,” [a company spokeswoman] said. “We’re sure this will be no different, but we think it’s in the best interest of the community.”

I’m sure the first thing people will do is compare Facebook to MySpace. However, unlike MySpace, Facebook has pretty good privacy controls in place that a reasonable number of people use. New people will only be able to see others in their geographical network. So unless college students join geographical networks in addition to their college networks, they should still be inaccessible to the random searcher.

More on this as it actually happens…

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours of students’ negative reactions to Facebook’s new “feed” features.

Here’s a summary of what’s going on:

• Hundreds of Facebook groups have been formed to protest the new features. The largest of these, Students Against Facebook News Feed, has over 225,000 members as of 9/6/06 11am PT, and is growing at a rate of about 20,000 members an hour. That’s a pretty big tribe of disgruntled users.
• Several grassroots protests have also been started outside of Facebook.com, including the Facebook.com Users Against the “News Feed” and “Mini Feed” petition, which has almost 32,000 signatures as of 9/6/06 11am PT, A Day Without Facebook campaign, and SaveFacebook.com.
• Fred Stutzman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, writes, “This morning, millions of college students are thinking differently about their online identity.”
• Michael Arrington, the editor of TechCrunch, writes, “Users who don’t participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention stream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in.”

These and other reactions to the new Facebook feed features elucidate a core tension developing on the web: In the attention economy of social networks, your behavior records are your currency.

Will you trade your privacy for others’ attention? It’s not a black and white question. You’ll make some things that you do public, but not all. When will you choose to make everything public? What life events or social conditions change the way you value privacy and attention online? Those are interesting questions.

Update: As of 2pm PT, the Students Against Facebook News Feed group on Facebook now has 300,000 members, adding 75,000 new members in the last 3 hours.

Update: As of 6pm PT, SAFNF now has 400,000 members, adding 100,000 new members in the last 4 hours.

Update: As of 11pm PT, SAFNF now has 500,000 members. That’s half a million people who’ve joined the protest in 2 days!

Update: As of 9/7/06 11pm PT, SAFNF now has 750,000 members. There are rumors that starting tomorrow there will be a new way to remove yourself from feeds.

Update: Facebook has indeed added new feed-specific privacy features. See the screenshot below:

Last night Facebook launched two new features: Mini Feed and News Feed. While News Feed is getting most of the attention, I think Mini Feed is the bigger change in the Facebook product.

With this update, Mini Feed supplants Personal Information as the dominant module on the profile page. “Personal Information” has historically been the hallmark value-add of Facebook for college students who want to “research” new people they meet a little more. This update prioritizes the friend-monitoring functionality of Mini Feed (and News Feed, which is just an aggregation of your friends’ Mini Feeds) above the research/stalking functionality of Personal Information.

I personally think people will vote with their attention and love this feature. Social dashboards were one of the most popular features we implemented at Standpoint, and I’m glad to see I now get a Facebook friend stream. However, sadly, the feed is not available in RSS, but only accessible within Facebook.com.