2008 – Remember when MTV was music television?
2010 – Remember when you could control what Facebook showed as public?
It all started so well.
They had the audience: Facebook had that demographic that just seemed to span everyone from those old enough to push keys on a keyboard to the insomniac old age pensioners looking to liven up their bleak later years in life.
They had the features: What started to most people as a way to either vent publicly or just share media online evolved into a complete social experience, one that we often felt (and still do) obliged to keep up to date constantly, lest we miss out on the next big thing. You could tag pictures, see pictures of yourself taken by others, comment on status, vent about your work, share your likes and dislikes with others – and more.
They added value: What started out as just indicating hobbies, grew into fan-clubs and groups you could participate into. They added the logic to the server backend that detected trends such as large numbers of people registering the same interests and then auto-creating groups with those names into which you could participate and contribute
Sidenote: You can try this for yourself – with the help of a few friends create a completely impossible hobby/interest and just watch as Facebook auto-creates a new ‘Group’ for that hobby/interest, although advertising an interest in “making hamburgers from dead people” might not be the smartest thing you ever did.
They had the niche: Often overlooked is one of the real reasons behind Facebook’s success – the curiosity of the average person. By nature – we’re just curious (or nosey as some prefer) – we love to know and see things we shouldn’t. Sure – Facebook had all these awsome features and a fast growing user-base but under all those numbers what was really at play were that more and more people were tapping into that quiet thrill of discovering things that kept us at the top of the gossip ladder.
And then they went too far…
It started with expanding the level of information exposed to your ‘Friends’ that was published in neat little News Feeds presented to each user on login.
You no longer had to check each of your ‘Friends’ mini-profiles to see what they were up to – it was presented to you on a plate on login. You could downrank (or even ignore) ‘News’ from individual ‘Friends’ if it wasn’t interesting enough – and lets face it – everyone has/had at least one ‘Friend’ who seemed to exist solely on Facebook 24/7.
We know what you want…
Facebook then took things one step further and with several updates iterated over the course of 3-4 months the control over what information from your own profile that was being published became less and less accessible. Sure – you could still reconfigure your privacy settings – if you could understand the differences between the different levels.
New accounts created had the more public ‘default’ privacy settings, new features added came with their own ‘default’ privacy settings too so that it became such an ordeal to keep a private profile that most just ignored the issue.
Facebook were laughing all the way to the bank all the while; their numbers were ever increasing, the service was becoming more popular and the amount of information being shared boggles the mind – the large portion of which Facebook was entitled to share with ‘limited 3rd parties’ (aka Advertising & Marketing companies)
Private. Really?
It was only a matter of time before someone started leveraging all of that lovely public information to show the true potential of having such a wealth of private information publicly available.
The API used to query the Facebook repository provided more and more features and the smart few took advantage of that information.
Are you a parent worried about your teenage daughter’s antics when she goes out at night? – Why not check if she’s ever posted if she lost her virginity – or better still – why not check if someone else claims to have been the other participant?
Want to know if your child has claimed that they cheated on a test?
All courtesy of Facebook. Read more about it here: http://youropenbook.org/about.html (The original GitHub repo is no longer available but is referenced here: http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_248/Transcript)
O’ Mother Where Art Thou?
One of the interesting trends of late is the recent drop in Facebook users due to their parents signing up. What’s the fun in updating your status to say “lost my virginity last night!” if you arrive home to find your parents waiting for you with a lecture on the risks of unprotected sex.
Word of Advice
My advice to those who do use Facebook is simply to be aware that it’s information you are posting on the internet, whether you think it private or not – someone is logging that information. Think of Facebook like your diary that you leave in the library – What you put in there is entirely up to you but anyone can read it if they find it
So where now?
After Facebook’s recent debacle with privacy settings the more tech savvy of folks are starting to look for an alternative. Diaspora spawned, attempting to be a more privacy conscious social network (http://www.joindiaspora.com/index.html) and there’s rumors-abound about Google’s new social network called Google-Me.
Food for thought: What’s the point of social networking though if nobody shares any information…?
Tags: facebook, failbook, google me, googleme, openbook, privacy
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