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Social Networking with Facebook

By Matthew Wittering

The first social networking site was launched by Randy Conrads in 1995, classmates.com.  The idea behind the site was to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances in your life.  To date there are in excess of 50 million registered users keeping track of friends from school, university and work. 

In February 2004 Facebook, the  popular social networking site was launched by Mark Zuckerberg. Currently Facebook has more than 64 million active registered users.  Facebook provides users with the tools to arrange social events, create groups for people with similar interests, upload and tag photos and message friends via pseudo email or “writing on a friend’s wall” (a part of the user’s profile page). 

Facebook has evolved and expanded into the most valued social networking site. It’s eighth major release, allows developers to design and build their own applications for the site.  Similar services can be replicated over other sites such as Bebo and Orkut using the Google API framework called OpenSocial.  OpenSocial allows interoperability of web site widgets and applications across many sites by setting standards and data exchange as with the Facebook platform.  What many users do not understand is that when they add the application to their Facebook profile they are surrendering personal information to third parties which could be later sold to unscrupulous Internet users. For the victim this could be as harmless (but irritating) as being added to a spam mailing list to as dangerous as full identity theft.

In 2006 it was estimated that Facebook developed $100 million in revenue and in 2007 Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of the business for $246 million.  This success can all be attributed to Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg CEO and founder is a Computer Science graduate from Harvard University and an entrepreneur. He launched Facebook as a web site tailored for Harvard students as a niche social networking site. This was then expanded subsequently to include other Ivy League schools in just the two months following its launch.  The idea was somewhat similar to Classmates.com and MySpace.

The name, Facebook, refers to the paper Facebooks depicting the members of the campus community that some U.S. colleges and preparation schools give to incoming students, faculty and staff as a way to get to know other people within their departments.

The site like many others is now driven by advertisements.  In fact, in the forth quarter of 2007 there were many articles covering the intrusive behaviour of the new Facebook advertisement system beacon.  Beacon provides users of Facebook alerts about friend’s purchases on external web sites via similar interests. This change to the site in December 2007 produced a lot of controversy because by default users were opted into the new service. Most of this controversy centred on the alerting family and friends about the purchase of items intended as Christmas presents. 

Facebook also produces Social Ads, providing targeted advertisements at users based upon contextual information about the user’s habits and interests. In principle this is similar to Google Adsense’s contextual advertisements which inject advertising into a website based on content on the current page. The concern with this advertisement channel is the inclusion of users’ profile photo and name with the advert as though you had just become the new face of the L’Oreal “because I’m worth it” adverts.

Traffic to Facebook from the UK so far this year is down 5%. I believe this is likely due to large mainstream media coverage over the risks of gatecrashing advertised events publicised through Facebook as well as identity theft and application spamming.

However, the scariest aspect to Facebook is found in the privacy policy statement.  “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.”

Facebook is a black hole for information... most users do not appriciate that it is impossible through design to remove your data from Facebook.  This is best summarised by Facebook. “You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.”

Facebook is not alone. MySpace is also experiencing a user revolt. On the 30th January it was International Delete Your MySpace Account `Day.  This day came about when Simon Owens on the bloggasm.com site blogged he was fed up with spam emails from MySpace.  I too participated in this event which was brought to my attention by the Mobuzz podcast (Mobuzz filmed in Madrid covers technology news stories).

Social Media sites are extremely good at meeting the needs of niche markets. However, while user generated content is an integral component of the Internet, so is protecting information about ourselves. Therefore, it is my belief that users must become more careful when joining and surrendering personal information to new web sites.