If you have a computer and an Internet connection, you can have a presence on Facebook, creating your own profile and connecting with friends, joining fan clubs, becoming part of groups. You can be serious or silly or anything in between (within limits). Grandparents and parents have joined Facebook, following their children and grandchildren, who originally popularized the site as college and high school students. Politicians and pundits and musicians are there too, connecting with their followers and fans. From humble beginnings, Facebook is now a worldwide phenomenon. On December 1, 2009, Facebook founder Zuckerberg wrote in an open letter to Facebook users:
It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.You can read more about the history of Facebook on Wikipedia.
For the young people who originally popularized Facebook, it remains primarily a social hub, a way for friends to stay in touch by posting status reports about their lives. Twitter may be grabbing some market share in this department, but Facebook is a premier site for this interaction. It offers the ability not only to post text (in longer doses than Twitter's 140 character limit), but also pictures and links and applications that friends can play together. In a student newspaper from my daughter's school, an article about social media largely focuses on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. A senior at a neighboring school cites Facebook as his favorite site and is quoted as saying:
Humans are social by nature and whatever means we create to communicate with each other, we're going to use it excessively.
Another senior says:
When I go on Facebook, it's a "destresser," and I'm able to get my mind off of school and just talk to my friends.(Sorry, no link for this, as the student newspaper is not online.)
Facebook is "free." None of those 350 million users are paying any money to Facebook. This is not uncommon on the Internet. Google is free. YouTube (now owned by Google) is free. Wikipedia is free. But then, Wikipedia is run by a non-profit foundation. Facebook and Google are very much for-profit businesses. So, is Facebook really "free"?
Facebook and Google make money from advertising. Many businesses pay to have ads and links placed on "your" Facebook page (or your Google search result page). The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook is going to integrate PayPal, so that it can attract more international advertising in countries where credit cards are not widely used. The article notes that currently 70% of Facebook's users (now 400 million strong in February of 2010) live outside the U.S. PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, covers 24 currencies in 190 markets. See Facebook's announcement on PayPal.
The popularity of these sites certainly makes them attractive for advertising. There is something even more attractive to advertisers in social media sites: your personal information.
I have been using Facebook for about six months now. Following a notable high school reunion last summer, I found that it was a way to keep in touch with friends that I had not seen in years. Next, I started connecting with college classmates and friends. This is really what attracts many to Facebook: the ability to stay in touch with friends and family. (It is embedded in the architecture of Facebook itself, which labels individuals with whom you chose to associate on Facebook as your "Friends".) I have seen criticism that Facebook is really becoming just one giant reunion site, with people of all ages joining to keep in touch. I suppose that is at least partly true, but I am not convinced that it is completely accurate or necessarily a bad thing if it were true. There is nothing wrong with people keeping in touch through this or any other site on the Internet. Human communication, even the frivolous kind, is part of the fabric of social interaction.
Nobler aspirations for Facebook should not be discouraged either. I am not sure that Facebook or Twitter or any other Internet site is going to overturn a brutally repressive government (e.g. Iran) any time soon, but Facebook certainly is capable of meaningful dialog on social and political issues. With the reservations noted later in this article, however, you should understand that Facebook is a user controlled media. It is what its users make it. Critics who scoff and shun Facebook because they are looking for more relevant dialog on social and political issues are missing the point. They should get on Facebook and start their own discussions and groups. There is plenty of diversity of opinion on Facebook about issues more pressing to our times than reunions, boy/girl friends, etc. Here are a some examples: political satirist Barry Crimmins (who happens to be a high school friend), British folk singer and political activist Billy Bragg (recently campaigning at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and on Facebook against bonuses for the bankers at the Royal Bank of Scotland), tax lawyer and blogger Kelly Erb (who uses the name "TaxGirl"), Facebook pages for Maryland organizations like The Walters Art Museum, The Creative Alliance, The Mount Vernon Cultural District, new services like The Wall Street Journal, NPR, PBS, a daily blessing from my wife's cousin's husband and a weather forecast, Foot's Forecast, from a local high school teacher and students (which has pretty much been spot-on in predicting our Snomaggedon winter in the Mid-Atlantic). So, Facebook can be what you make it and each user adds something else to the mix. It may have aspects of an evil empire behind the curtain, but the critics should stop complaining about the problems and start becoming part of the solutions.
Facebook is also a tabula rasa where users can create a body of portrait of themselves and can find similar collections of information about their friends. Facebook encourages and facilitates this exchange of personal ideas, thoughts and information by providing ways to post and share pictures, notes, links to the Web, books that you have read, etc. Every user has his or her own "Wall" on which their status updates, shared links or other postings can be found and on which friends can (and are encouraged by Facebook) to write.
These posts go out to friends and others and are displayed on each user's News page. There are also third party applications that provide games or other interactive ways for self-expression yourself through Facebook. I use Facebook, in part, as an online archive of interests and thoughts. Many other users do the same, in their own personal and distinctive way. Facebook is a wonderful tool for self-expression. I really mean that in a very positive sense.
There is a commercial side, however, to all this self-expression. Remember that Facebook is not a non-profit. Underneath the social veneer, Facebook is trying to make money. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on one of Facebook's more popular applications, Farmville. Farmville is played by 31 million people a day. According theTimes, it cost around $300,000 to make and brings in around $113 million a year!
Although Facebook is built on the premise that you choose those with whom you wish to associate and share information, Facebook also subtly (or perhaps not so subtly) pushes users to share more information with more people. It begins with what happens on the right hand side of your Facebook page. There you find various things, like requests from others to connect as a friend, suggestions from Facebook of people that you might want to "friend" (now officially a verb, along with "unfriend"), and reminders about the birthdays of your friends. There are also advertisements, suggestions of birthday gifts for friends, and other suggested ways for you to connect or find new "friends", like a Facebook solicitation that asks you to invite friends who are not on Facebook to become users. There is a Friend Finder search. On your Profile page, you are encouraged to put information about yourself, your family, your likes and interests.
Sharing is a very important part of Facebook (and the Internet in general) these days. As a Facebook user, you can join "Groups" or become a "Fan". Groups can be established on Facebook as a way for people with a common interest to share and discuss that interest, whether serious or frivolous. Organizations and artist or authors or bloggers or others can set up a public page on Facebook that requires you to associate yourself by being a becoming a "Fan". Once part of a Group or a Fan of an organization, etc., you will begin receiving postings for these sites. They will appear on your (recently redesignated "Top News" and "Most Recent" pages.
Facebook has been reconfiguring its pages recently. Although you have settings to control these features and the content that you see, Facebook exercises some manipulation behind the curtain, particularly in the "Top News" feature. The "Top News" is now managed by some programming function of Facebook that selects postings to be displayed based in some way on your designated preferences and usage patterns. There is some user control over this, but in my experience it has limited effect in overriding Facebook's own program. I am not sure why Facebook thinks that this kind of selectivity (censorship?) is a good thing for us or if it has fully explained its operative characteristics, but it makes me feel manipulated. The "Most Recent", on the other hand, is supposed to be everything from everyone in your social circle. (Given the manipulation going on with the "Top News", however, I am not sure that I trust that the "Most Recent" feed is complete.)
When one of your friends or groups or fan sites posts a message or shares a link with you, your are encouraged to respond by either making a "Comment" or click to register that you "Like" the post. (Many Facebook users (in the millions) are campaigning for Facebook to add a "Dislike" response. (I became a fan or joined three of these campaigns as I wrote this column.) You also may have the option to "Share" a post with your friends. For example, the day I wrote a part of this post, I received a post from NPR, which updated an earlier story about the disappearance of Internet pioneer Philip Agre. This update indicated that the UCLA police had located Agre. I wrote an update as part of this blog, but I also shared this post with my friends on Facebook, as I had done with the original NPR report on his disappearance.
Many Internet sites also now encourage you to share reports or other information on their websites with your friends on social media sites like Facebook. So, if I am reading an interesting piece on the Internet site at NPR or The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, there may be a button on that site that allows me to share a link to the article and a brief introduction with my friends on Facebook or other social media sites. Even if the website does not have a function to do that, I have an application on my browser that will automatically set up a Facebook link to the page that I am viewing and share it on Facebook.
Facebook shares with your friends information on whom you have recently "friended." It also tells your friends sites on Facebook that you recently have joined or of which you have become a fan. This, of course, encourages your friends to follow your lead and make new friends or join new groups or become fans of other sites. In effect, much of what you do on Facebook is being used by Facebook to influence your friends to expand their usage of Facebook.
All this connection with others and interchange and sharing of information is wonderful. It is what makes the Internet such a powerful piece of technology today. For Facebook, it also is a goldmine. Whether you share your information with the whole world or not, you are sharing it with Facebook. Facebook uses what you post and what you do to target its approach to you as a user. List your favorite music or bands, and you will start to see ads posted on your page for related products or programs. I listed Little Feat as a favorite band. I now get ads for t-shirts of the late Feat guitarist Lowell George. I listed Los Lobos, and got promotional ads from PBS for a recent performance of Los Lobos at The White House. Facebooks cross-references your Friends list with the Friends lists of each of your friends and suggests new friends. In the part of your page that Facebook reserves to suggest Friends, you will get a message:
John SmithIf you want to use one of those third-party applications that abound on Facebook, you will notice that the application asks for access to your personal profile information before you can use the application. This is partly because the application may need certain information about you to operate effectively, but it also means that your personal information may be used other ways, to target advertising through the application, to solicit your friends to use the application, etc. I have a friend whose husband signed her up for an application called Mafia Wars. I started getting all kinds of postings from Mafia Wars asking that I "help" my friend achieve some level of accomplishment within Mafia Wars. In order to do so, however, I had to give Mafia Wars access to my information. It was an offer I chose to refuse.
5 mutual friends
Facebook is not unique in using your information and usage patterns to target its advertising and business development. Google does the same thing when you use it to search or as a home page. Google is trying to encourage social networking through its homepage and its social networking site Google Buzz, but Facebook is far ahead in this area.
Facebook is also an entirely different environment from Google. Search on Google can be informative, but it is also episodic and limited. Social networking on Facebook is a more pervasive and personal. Because of its ability to draw you into interaction with others, social networking sites, by design, seek to become a integral part of your life. In the process, such sites expect us to share more and more information with one another. What it means, however, is that you should be careful what you do and share on these sites.
Mark Zuckerberg's open letter mentioned above seems to focus on issues of privacy on Facebook. It largely addresses changes that Facebook made at the end of last year in its privacy settings. Zuckerberg talks about this as "empowerment" of Facebook users, giving them more control over who sees what information about the user. These new settings do give the user a wider range of options for sharing the various types of information posted to Facebook. The new settings also are more complicated, requiring the user to go through several menus and select what level of privacy they want for status information, shared links, photographs, etc. This can be daunting at times. Now, when you post on Facebook, you are often give a menu for that posting which allows you to expanded or limit who sees what you share.
The problem here may be remembering to do this each time you post. I often forget, because my primary intent is to get my thought or link out. Thus, your defaults settings become all important. Zuckerberg's letter also makes clear that the good folks at Facebook have given your privacy considerable thought and "concluded" certain changes were in your best interests. Zuckerberg and Facebook clearly think they have figured out what you need and want. That kind of approach troubles me, containing a touch of "Big Brother". Zuckerberg pulls back from the edge toward the end of the letter:
We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.This is probably a fitting conclusion for a user driven site like Facebook. You, the user, need to protect your privacy, not simply assume that Facebook is going to do it for you. Future Tense recently reported that social media like Twitter and Facebook have become popular with Internet criminals who are running scams to get a hold of your identity and financial information. The New York Times recently ran a report on three essential steps to protect your privacy on Facebook. These are checking the settings on (1) who is allowed to see your posted status updates, photographs, videos, etc., (2) who is allowed to see your profile information and (3) whether your information is available to public search engines like Google or Bing or Yahoo. Similarly, the ABA Journal recently ran an article, "Saving Face" by Dennis Kennedy, which discussed ways to protect your privacy and identity on Facebook.
If you use Facebook, be sure you check all of your privacy settings under the various submenus of the "Settings" menu, not just the "Privacy Settings" submenu. Consider carefully what information you post on Facebook and just you want to see that information. Consider also what sharing your information with "Everyone" really means -- basically that anyone, anywhere may be able to access what you are posting and harvest information from it. Having friends is a great thing, but be careful to check out people seeking to become your friend before you open up your information to them. Also, beware of communication that looks like it comes from a friend, but may contain links to that lead you to sites where you may be tricked into giving out your personal and financial information.
