How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
Obviously I think about Facebook a lot. Usually about twice a day, I get a pressing urge to just make sure the internet hasn't changed. Maybe someone's sent me a message. Maybe if my life were more exciting, I wouldn't have to live vicariously through the status updates of others.If a friend falls in a forest and nobody posts a photo, did it really happen? (I'll come back to that another day.)
The main point Cory makes in that article (above) is that social networking sites force users to open themselves up to akward situations, which then cause them to migrate to new sites. The networking sites bring together contacts from all areas of our lives, all viewing the same profile. This can cause trouble.
I've seen many examples of this happening recently. As friends start teaching or working, they open their profiles up to whole new social mixes. In real life, relationships are broken into areas; your elderly workmates don't see what you did at the weekend, and you can't stare at photos of your ex with her new beau. But on Facebook, students can trace their lecturer's wife, and creeps can save copies of your drunken embarrassments before you can de-tag them away.Sure, it doesn't have to be like this - there are privacy settings, and you can exercise some control over your friendship list. But privacy settings only restrict outsiders, and there are social pressures not to exclude some people. Can you refuse your boss, or you mother?
Facebook could be destroyed because you can't present all the varied facades you do in real life. Lists grow longer, we all get older, we move on, and complications arise.
Perhaps it all forces an honesty of self, but I suspect that many people prefer migration to censoring their fractured self. As users loose control over who sees what, they loose their freedom and are likely to seek asylum on whichever new website will privately harbour their community. We've already seen a repeated boom and bust cycle to social networking sites as the grumblers leave and the critical mass shifts behind them.
If Facebook is to continue to dominate it needs a system for splitting your profile. There are already limited tools in place for this, but they're buried. We need controls to secretly designate different social groups and present different fronts to each. LiveJournal and Flickr already have these kind of controls on a limited scale. Facebook will have to follow. They really need to spend more time polishing up usability and introducing users to the possibilities, and less time selling out our privacy and letting idiots host virtual aquariums. If it's going to survive, any given social networking site needs to remain useful, and not become a mess of gimmicks dancing to corporate themes. They have to let us be our many selves.