Facebook Talk

It’s widely been reported that Facebook has been holding out on selling to a larger company until they are offered $2 billion for the site. But Yahoo news is reporting that serious talks are going on right now for the creators of Facebook to sell the site to Yahoo for $1 billion, which would be close to double what Myspace sold for.

The only word that seems to come to mind is, “Wow….”

Yahoo News is reporting that not only will users be allowed to switch networks, but that ANY Internet user will be allowed to join.

You know, Facebook seems to be destroying one of their two advantages they hold over Myspace. Before, when I went to somebody’s profile on Facebook, I knew I was going to see a fellow college individual and I didn’t have to worry about some crappy band’s website loading in the backgroup or some D-list comedian adding me as his friend or seeing a middle school kid with a seizure inducing background. But now, all of the above will be able to join up onto Facebook. I bet soon people will be allowed to change the look of their profile, which will completely destroy the line between Facebook and Myspace.

Yahoo points out that Facebook has 1/11th the membership of Myspace (10 million to 109 million). Yet with Facebook, you have a targeted niche for advertisers and thus a product ad geared towards college kids should perform and convert on Facebook than on Myspace, despite the former having less than 10% of the latter’s members. We here at FBT see this move simply as meaning that Facebook is looking for more money, whether it be higher ad costs or a larger pricetag come time to sell the site by the fact that they have more members. Either way, we don’t like it and think that Facebook should stick to just college kids, no matter what.

Which means kicking you high schoolers off while we’re at it!

That’s right folks! Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s director of marketing, let it be known that, “probably in the next month” Facebook would allow it’s users to see the profile of anybody they wanted, not just the profiles of those who go to their schools or who are in their geographic networks.

Well, let me back up. What Facebook is about to do is allow anybody to join any geographic network they want. Up until now, users were limited to joining only one geographical network in addition to their school. This means that if I went to school in Columbia, South Carolina, then moved to New York for a year and then moved to Chicago, I had to pick between staying in my New York network and being able to see the profiles of everybody else in the NY network, or switching to my Chicago network. But now, I will be able to have both, as well as sign up for countless others.

This might not seem like much at first glance, but think about it. Anybody will be able to join your network now and in turn, check out your profile, pictures, contact info, etc. This won’t get nearly as much attention as the news feeds did, but it certaintly warrants the amount the news feeds got, if not more. People’s main qualms with the news feeds was that it could create stalkers, but this arguement was limited because the only people who could see the news feed was your friends and I highly doubt your own friends would want to stalk you. But these new features will allow anybody to see your profile, friend or not, and thus the risk of stalkers is ten times more likely.

We here at FBT, however, see this as a positive change. I for one am sick and tired of seeing somebody comment on my friend’s wall, clicking their picture, and being told I can’t see their profile. But now if I’m really interested in talking to them on their wall or finding out their interests, all I’ll have to do is join their network and VIOLA! I’m in.

Melanie Deitch did point out that users won’t be allowed to frequently change geographic networks. Once they’ve chosen one, they are stuck there for a while, although she failed to mention how long “a while” will be for. A day? A week? A month?

It’s also worth noting that Ms. Deitch made it clear that Facebook wishes to fully educate it’s users on the new changes before launching them, so as more news is forthcoming, we’ll report on it here.

[via TechCrunch]

Donna Bogatin has a great article on how trivial the recent uproar over the new Facebook features was in the grand scheme of things. Yet what seems to stand out more to her is how much more could have been accomplished - and still could be - had the effort and attention been pointed toward something more worthwhile, such as the war in Iraq, world hunger, or any other number of global issues.

We here at FBT couldn’t agree more. It’s funny how an anti-news feed group on Facebook can gain 750,000+ members in 72 hours, but a group dedicated to ending the fighting in Sudan can only gain a whopping total of 10,000 in two years.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. Since Facebook’s public response and apology yesterday, the growth numbers of the anti-feed groups went from a few thousand an hour to nothing. In fact, people are flocking out of the groups and the buzz has all but died. These 750,000+ people could have used the surge of attention to focus their strength and voice onto a similar cause, such as an anti-Big Brother movement or a movement to make more people realize how much information about them is spread on the Internet. But no, they didn’t, and instead chose to deem their “revolution” a success and go back to poking their friends and living in their own little bubble.

The college students of the 1960s and 70s must be proud of how their children turned out…

And just like that, everything is solved. I logged into my Facebook account today and found this:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

There’s been so much written about Facebook lately that I decided to make one large post of all the articles that I will update as needed. Here’s what I’ve found so far and if you find or know of any others, please leave them in the comments! Thanks!

(Quick sidenote: What’s up with all the college newspaper’s titles starting with “The Daily?” How many of them are actually published daily. That’s what I thought.)

Major Media Coverage

AP News
Bloomberg
CBS News
CNN Money
Digg
MSNBC
Poynter
The Register
Reuters
Seattle PI
Slashdot
TechWeb
TIME
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Post
WIRED.com

Yahoo

College News Coverage

The Badger Herald
Ball State Daily News
The Baylor Lariat
The BG News
The Breeze
The Cavalier Daily
The Chanticleer
The Commonwealth Times
Collegiate Times
The Cornell Daily Sun
The Crimson White
The Daily Athenaeum
The Daily Campus
The Daily Californian
The Daily Collegian
The Daily Free Press
The Daily Gamecock
Daily Illini On-Air
The Daily Texan
The Daily Toreador
The Daily Trojan
The Daily Vidette
The Diamondback
The Exponent
The GW Hatchet
Indiana Daily Student
The Minnesota Daily
Northern Star
The State News
The Tufts Daily
The University Daily Kansan

AP News is reporting that as early as tomorrow, Facebook will give every user the option of turning off their Mini Feed. Some are already claiming that this is victory in the war against the new features, but I see this simply as the sped up process of something that would have happened anyways. Every other feature on Facebook has the option to disable it and if you go back and look at the timeline, that option usually was given a week or two after the feature was unveiled.

Furthermore, the article talks about how people are concerned that Facebook is turning into a Big Brother type site, recording your every move for who knows what. Yet what stuns me is how many of these people see Facebook in such a light, but fail to see Google, Yahoo, and almost every other site out there in the same way. It’s no secret that Google records every search you make, yet I don’t see any Anti-Google Information Recording groups on Facebook.

Some might say that’s because Google doesn’t display what you recently searched for to your friends, but I would argue that Facebook isn’t doing that either. If Facebook suddenly added to the Mini Feeds private information, scuh as “Goob just poked Sally” or “Goob just searched for Mary Jones” or “Goob just messaged Patty” then I’d be livid. But as long as they keep it at publicly available information (at least info only my friends can see), I’m fine with it.