There have been very interesting developments at Facebook in the last few weeks. It wasn’t until today that I felt compelled to write about them.
At F8 in April, Facebook released the highly-anticipated Opengraph platform. This turned out to be a series of somewhat underwhelming additions to the plug-ins already available to websites through Facebook Connect. We spent some time at Think! on determining the relevance of Facebook Fan Pages as Opengraph gets rolled out and concluded that Fan Pages were more relevant to facebook users as a platform for building a community. While Opengraph would help to boost Facebook traffic by connecting websites to the social graph, Fan Pages are still an absolute essential component to marketing through social media.
Many people have discussed the corresponding changes to Facebook’s privacy policy and the mainstream media has played its part in sensationalizing these changes. Here’s one article that claims that 5000 people commiting to ‘Quit Facebook Day’ is significant in comparison to the millions of users flocking to Facebook each month…
For Opengraph to succeed, Facebook needs user’s profiles to become more open. No longer is everything hidden behind your personal network. At the moment, some trivial personal information is now publicly available, eg what you ‘Like’ and your friend list. However, its clear that this could be just the beginning and that’s why some government privacy regulators are pricking up their ears. Facebook (or whatever network replaces it) is an online reflection of our real life. People are mainly concerned about privacy when they have something to hide. If you don’t want people to know something, you have to question whether you should be doing it in the first place… Although, nobody wants everything broadcast to their entire personal network. That’s where the awareness problem comes into it. Facebook want you to forget to log out after each session so that you’re logged in to the rest of the web through Connect and Opengraph. That’s why Facebook buried the log out button within a menu. Facebook also have a vested interest in users not fully understanding the customizable privacy settings, especially for what information gets blasted into newsfeeds. For example, many people agonize over changing their relationship settings on Facebook after a break-up because of that dreaded news feed. That’s only because they don’t understand that they can turn off news feeds for their relationship setting.
As a user, I’m heavily invested in Facebook. All of my friends are there and I’m tagged in many photos I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. I’ve reconnected with people who would have been lost. That’s why Facebook has the gravity and somewhere in the vicinity of half a billion users. Part of Facebook’s success is attributable to the fact that users enter their real name. For much of the internets history, we’ve been anonymous when browsing the web. Anonymity won’t be the case forever. Multiple account logins are hard to remember and most importantly, our social graph provides amazing context for what we do online. Thus far, our Facebook profiles the closest thing we have to an online representation. Facebook have decided that they’re going to make a play to be our online profile, through Opengraph. This is a change in direction from where they started and what users and application developers thought they were signing up for.
Some commentators are calling for an open alternative to Facebook.
Many application developers are diversifying rather than operating exclusively on Facebook (including Think!). Zynga, the largest app developer on Facebook, are rumoured to have run out of steam with negotiations and are considering starting their own competing platform. It is important to keep in mind that half of Facebook’s users also use Zynga’s applications.
Facebook is not the best suited company to represent our online profile but they have the gravity. In theory, no company is best suited to this task. It should be something coordinated by the people, for the people, etc. In the real world, this is called a democratically elected government. The problem here is that governments are inherently limited to national boundaries, whereas the online sphere is not. The closest thing we have is open source.
Next, Facebook introduced the community page. Many large brands were angry that they weren’t notified. Here’s an interesting take on community management without control.
Facebook have now announced that Facebook Fan Pages with under 10,000 Fans (not a small number) cannot set their default landing tab to a custom application. Every small business who’s invested time and money to develop a custom landing page is no longer able to promote their brand how they intended on Facebook (because they’ve logically put their small marketing of eggs in Facebook’s basket).
Facebook is a very immature platform. So too is social networking as a marketing platform. Constant changes without notification will continue to alienate both individual and business users. Rather than opportunism, Facebook needs to manage user expectations more clearly. Online social networking is in its infancy and we will witness an amazing transformation in our lifetimes. Until today, I was almost convinced that Facebook would be the key player. Perhaps Facebook have made enough mistakes to create a real opportunity for competitors. (I wrote an old blog about Facebook having to make a big mistake to lose out now). Users want a platform where they can control their privacy. Diaspora is one company who see this opportunity very clearly. In a familiar setting, a group of college students asked for $10,000 in donations to get started and set a deadline of June 1, 2010. They’ve already smashed this goal, having raised over $175,000.
The upside; Facebook has the gravity but it will be interesting to see how this plays out. They could easily reverse any of these changes if the user-base revolts.
