It's been a very odd couple of months. Since Facebook removed the requirement for academic email addresses for those who wanted to join the service, the site has undergone exponential growth. I don't know what the students have to say about the inevitable influx of mid-30s media luvvies and hipsters, but by the looks of it, an awful lot of people have poured into the site.
Without really intending to, a lot of people have ended up spending far too much time finding old friends and joining daft groups on this, the latest social networking site. I feel I can say this with authority, as I seem to end up checking the site several times a day - usually against my better judgement.
Of course, there's plenty of amusing coverage of the site and the phenomenon, including the recent suggestion by boffins that Facebook is for toffs and Myspace is for the uneducated.
Sadly, while this makes a great headline, the reality is somewhat less
exciting. Myspace, like Bebo, is popular with kids, while Facebook is
self selecting, since it was originally only open to those with
academic email accounts.
Anyway, aside from all of that interesting stuff, there are a couple
of other elements that make social networking of interest. Firstly,
it's quite odd where snippets of Facebook information end up. A friend
takes his facebook news feed and puts it into annoying Twitter-alike Jaiku. Suddenly, all his friend's locations, thoughts and activities are available to all, rather than the audience they select.
On top of that, there's actually no way to secure this data against Facebook's own search facility. BoingBoing has a good summary
of what's happened. Two things; will people care that their own
thoughts, previously only shared with a few friends, suddenly become
public? Secondly, do people care about this, even it could have a huge
effect on everything from employment prospects to relationships,
further down the line?
Good questions Ben. I'm astonished that private stuff can be pushed out into the ether.
ReplyDeleteIm on it, it has it limited but it does seem like a very nicely done community
ReplyDelete@ David: it's a case of someone you know publishing it, even inadvertently. A friend of mine on facebook published all of his friends' updates to a Jaiku feed, which can be grabbed very easily by someone searching for someone's name.
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for Christopher Soghoian's search attack - if you know the name of your target, you can play Go Fish with the search tools in Facebook until you gather all the information you could wish for. I'm sure a script to do it automatically is not far off.
@ Damian: I agree, it's neatly done and very well executed. I find it completely addictive and it's great to be in touch with people so easily. But there are security concerns that need to be addressed. Social networking sites rely on the user posting as much information as possible, even privately, and there are good reasons not to do this.