Internet | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Google Will Spur Facebook Growth

Facebook‘s so-called “walled garden” is about to get a lot more like the blood-brain barrier, which is good news for people who want Facebook to become their all-in-one networking utility.

And the privacy concerns some are immediately raising seem to be reflexive rather than reflective.

In biology, the blood-brain barrier protects the brain from chemicals in the bloodstream. Likewise, Facebook puts up a barrier to the wider internet that prevents spam messages from getting through.

Facebook announced today that extremely limited versions of its users’ profiles will be available for viewing through Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Techcrunch rightly notes the grave implications for some start-ups looking to fill the people search niche. An SEO blog also notes benefits for companies that want to be found online (and therefore for their customers, who are looking for them). Other reasonable analyses are here, here and here.
Many of the objections raised today are the standard response of those who see a privacy threat in every aggregation of online data, or worse yet, a conspiracy. Like this laughable Flash-in-the-pan that tries to connect Facebook’s Terms of Service (in which users are saying, in legalese, that they have the right to upload whatever they put on Facebook and that Facebook has the right to display it on the internet) to everything from global climate change to the JFK assassination.

In essence, the Google bots will come in a month from now (after everyone in Facebook has had the opportunity to opt out) and will index profile content. But when your (or my) Facebook profile comes back in the search results, all anyone will see will be something like this:

Hard to see a big threat there. And those with phobias about privacy implications can opt out, so no one outside Facebook can search for them.

For the fearless, this is a great development. I will be able to do a Google search for people I know and find out whether they are in Facebook, so I can send them a message or a friend request. But because people who aren’t Facebook members can’t send a message without joining, we don’t have to worry about this opening the spam floodgates.

It will, however, encourage lots more people to join Facebook, as they see Facebook listings for people they know showing up high in the Google results, and as they discover they need to be members to send a message to them.

Facebook has been growing at over a million users a week already; this will only accelerate what Newsweek called its “astonishing” growth.

Technorati: Facebook, Google, Techcrunch, privacy

Facebook: A Series of Tubes?

TIME magazine’s recent article – “Why Facebook is the Future” – contains this excellent synoposis of what Facebook really is:

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not.

And so, with that description of Facebook as “a Net within the Net,” we can’t help but refer to Sen. Ted Stevens’ definition of the internet as a whole to help us better understand what Facebook is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE]

Sen. Stevens’ speech was repeatedly ridiculed on The Daily Show and elsewhere by those who thought it demonstrated a, well… less-than-complete understanding of the internet and how it works.Yet some of the chatter about Facebook and its suitability for business use doesn’t sound much more enlightened than either Sen. Stevens or Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, and her explanation of why U.S. students don’t know much about geography…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

Using Facebook for business won’t “plug up the tubes” and get in the way of the personal messages you want to deliver. It’s also not just for college students; the 35+ age demographic is the fastest growing segment among its 35+ million members.

Sure, many of the applications developed for its platform are pointless diversions, but there are some quite useful ones. For example, file sharing applications like Files and MediaFire provide shared virtual hard drives for file exchange. I’ll be reviewing those in a future post. Both provide handy work-arounds to the file size limits most people have in their email, and without the complicated language of ftp servers.
Others have raised the red flags – or red herrings – of inappropriately personal applications causing embarrassment. For example, a SuperPoke user might inadvertenly slap, bite, kick or pinch a business colleague instead of poking.

Egads! The solution to that would be, “Don’t slap, bite, kick or pinch your professional associates.” Or don’t install SuperPoke. Or why would you poke a co-worker when you could send a message instead?

Others suggest that personal photos posted by others, which appear on your Wall or in your mini-feed, could be embarrassing. Those situations can be substantially resolved by adjusting your privacy settings for your limited profile and not showing your Wall or mini-feed to your professional colleagues.

For some people who wouldn’t think of using Facebook for business, the language I just used is foreign; that’s because they haven’t tried Facebook, and so they are making judgments based on rumor and hearsay instead of personal experience.

Facebook is an information-sharing utility. It works well for personal, diversionary pursuits, and it works equally well for sharing information and creating discussions of professional topics.

Just as the same internet “tubes” carry personal and business emails — and even 10 movies at one time — so can the same Facebook infrastructure facilitate maintenance of personal and business relationships without getting things “tangled up.”

And there are even some map applications that could help Miss Upton.

Technorati: Facebook, Ted Stevens, series of tubes, Files, MediaFire, Facebook platform, Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina, maps

Facebook in Time Magazine

Time magazine keeps up the pace with Newsweek in having a significant article about Facebook, as Lev Grossman writes, “Why Facebook Is the Future”

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it–a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you’re a dog.
Maybe that’s why Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they’re refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet’s founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook–it’s just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you’re annoying folks, you’ll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.

That’s right. Because it’s opt-in, Facebook is the Spam killer. It creates a whole new class of email, because the messages you get are from people you know. Anyone who is in Facebook can send a message to any other member, but those who repeatedly send unwelcome messages can be blocked or reported to be bounced from the network.Those who complain of the “walled garden” nature of Facebook should remember that sometimes walls are helpful: they keep the bad guys out.

Here’s a related interview from last month with Mark Zuckerberg. I highly recommend you read this as well. Here are some highlights:

TIME: Is Facebook’s popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.
Zuckerberg: That’s the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That’s a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community — we’re not trying to build a community — we’re not trying to make new connections.
TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a “social utility” rather than a “social network?”
Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.
TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company’s newfound cachet?
Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that’s something that’s pretty exciting to the business community. It’s also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.

TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?
Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven’t translated the site yet, but that’s something we’re working on and it should be done soon. What we’re doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.

This is great weekend reading, as is the Newsweek article, to give background on why Facebook will be such a force in the future of the internet. And I’ve written a few things about Facebook, too, particularly how it can be used for business.
Technorati: Time, Time magazine, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Newsweek

Of COURSE Facebook is for Business

A recent Techmeme has it that “Facebook’s closed platform and data lock-in” make it “NOT for Business.”

Please. Of COURSE Facebook is for business.

Any place that has 35 million people spending an average of 20 minutes a day absolutely has business uses.

If Facebook isn’t for business, then neither is eBay. Except of course now everyone knows people have made hugely profitable businesses solely on eBay. Many businesses found eBay valuable as a means of finding and selling to broadly dispersed customers. Even for business-to-business sales.

Now, doesn’t eBay have exactly the kind of “walled garden” characteristics that so many find it fashionable to revile in Facebook? How does it differ?

Facebook is, as Mark Zuckerberg says, a social utility. Utilities are like heating and electricity. They do things, or empower you to do things. Right off the bat there are lots of ways businesses can use Facebook to accomplish their goals. I’ve outlined a few Facebook business uses here. But beyond that, Facebook is infinitely extensible. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can wait for someone to develop the application you need, or you can contract to develop the application yourself.

And unlike heat and lights — or eBay for that matter — you can use Facebook for free.

The problem isn’t with Facebook. It’s a lack of imagination in how to use it. Facebook, Twitter and all the other web 2.0 tools are just that: tools.

They aren’t the only tools for business; but web-wise MacGyvers will find creative ways to use them – not necessarily exactly according to the user manual (oh yeah, there is no user manual) – to accomplish their organizations’ goals.

For those concerned about mixing their personal and professional selves, I offer this: You can have lots of interaction with people with common interests in Facebook without becoming their Friend. You can just belong to the same groups. And for non-family members, you can use the limited profile to avoid divulging an information about yourself that you think others might find controversial. More on that in a future post.
Technorati: Facebook, eBay, business, marketing, PR, Twitter, MacGyver, walled gardens, social networks, social utility