History

Kate Raynes-Goldie:

"I think the best way to understand how Facebook has gone beyond being just a social networking site is to see how it has evolved from what we meant by social networking site in 2004. Facebook’s three big axes of change can be summarized in terms of access, audience and information the first two of which are closely intertwined. The first Facebook, which was actually officially called thefacebook at the time (pictured courtesy archive.org) was essentially just your profile and a list of your friends, like all good social networks of the time (and still some today).

Access-wise, early Facebook was closed - you needed a valid email address from an approved school to join, which was just Harvard at first. The audience was students exclusively, and had features specifically for that purpose, such as being able to see who was in your classes. Or helping you get laid, as Karel Baloun, one of the first Facebook engineers, suggests in his book on the subject: “Facebook gives users what they want, which for college students is information about their friends and schoolmates for the purpose of… well … sex. And fun social events, which lead to sex” (Inside Facebook, p 91). And lastly, the information on thefacebook was ephemeral. You could change stuff on your profile, and no one would know unless they went looking and could remember what you had there before. As danah boyd puts it, there was security in obscurity. Closed doors, ephemeral information and a student-only audience made people feel safe sharing their real and personal details about themselves. If only other students will see, and only those I want, it’s okay for me to post my dorm room and mobile number on Facebook. In fact, people felt encouraged to do so. There was a pay off - it made socializing easier. People will give up their privacy if they get something in exchange, like free air travel (Air Miles cards) or convenience (putting your thumb and iris on file to cross the border faster, as with the Nexxus card in North America). It was this closed, student only phase in Facebook’s history that created Facebook’s continuing culture of sharing lots of accurate personal information that gives Facebook its tremendous value. I suspect things would not be the same if Facebook had opened up to everyone right away, since it was still unusual to so closely tie one’s offline life and identity with their online one.

Anyway, as we all know, Facebook opened it’s doors to everyone. Slowly at first, with high school kids first being allowed on (September 2005). Then select companies, such as Apple and Microsoft (May 2006), then everyone (September 2006).** This fateful day in September was also the day that Facebook added the News and Mini-Feeds. It was a double whammy. No longer could you feel projected from the rest of the world by Facebook’s walls of valid-email-requirements and that feel relatively assured that those drunken party photos from last night’s kegger would probably not grace the eyes of your boss.*** In fact, now, your boss would probably get notified that the pictures were posted, via her shiny new News Feed. All at once, everything was different.

First, the information on Facebook that had once been ephemeral was now not only artifactual, but was also being actively pushed to your friends. The formerly invisible act of updating your profile was now visible. Activities change when we know people are watching. They become performative. Now, not only was your profile performative, but the act of maintaining it was also a performance. The addition of feeds made it possible to watch snippets of our friends lives, without having to interact with them or even having them know we watching. It’s the replacement of reciprocal interaction with information flows. The recent redesign has reinforced this informational shift. The default thing you see when you view someone’s profile is no longer their personal and contact information, but the activity from their wall and mini-feeds combined. In fact, you could probably say this is an emerging axis of change on Facebook that is strongly related to the informational shift - a shift in focus from personal information to a focus on one’s activity and interactions with others.

Secondly, Facebook had moved from being closed to open access, and in so doing had changed from catering to students to catering to everyone. This change in audience not only meant changes in Facebook’s affordances to make it more appealing to a mainstream audience (for example, getting rid of the courses feature), but a change in every users’ potential audience. Now all the early adopters had to rethink if that profile they had created when Facebook was students-only was appropriate for everyone in their lives to potentially see.

So what is Facebook now? I’m still working on it, but it’s more than a social networking site since creating and articulating our networks is definitely only the foundation of what we’re actually doing on Facebook these days. The front page of Facebook (the one you see when you’re logged out) says it’s a “social utility” that can be used to “keep up with friends and family; share photos and videos; control privacy online; and reconnect with old classmates.” But overall, it “connects you with the people around you.” Baloun (remember that Facebook engineer?) says that “everything social can be transacted inside [Facebook]” (Inside Facebook, p 71). While not yet a reality, it’s certainly Zuckerberg’s fantasy of how he wants Facebook to be, and says a lot about what I think is an inherent believe at Facebook: that everything can be reduced to 1s and 0s. Today, Facebook is social networking, but its also life streaming, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, event organizing and a bunch of other stuff we haven’t got proper names for yet. But take that thought and add this: some would say that like MySpace, Facebook is “the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion, exquisitely disguised as social networking.” (http://k4t3.org/2008/09/29/the-changing-faces-of-facebook/)

Status

Statistics, from Ryan Lanham:

Recent numbers on Facebook's usage and growth:

   * More than 250 million active users 
   * More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day. 
   * More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college. 
   * The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older. 
   * 54.6% of users are female. 
   * There are 16.5% less high school users, and 21.7% less college users.

There has been a staggering increase in the number of 55+ users – with total growth of 513.7% in in the last six months alone.

   * Average user has 120 friends on the site 
   * More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide) 
   * More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day 
   * More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day 
   * Facebook holds 15 billion photos. 
   * Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 1 billion photos a month. 
   * More than 10 million videos uploaded each month

More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

   * More than 2.5 million events created each month 
   * More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site 
   * About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States 
   * Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications 
   * More than 200 applications have more than one million monthly active users 
   * There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. 
   * People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

(every statistic above is sourced, from Ryan Lanham, by email, September 2009)

Discussion

Openness

Glyn Moody:

"Facebook is built on free software, as this post notes:

From the day Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, the site has been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, memcached, MySQL, and PHP.

Moreover, it has established a nice track record of releasing its own code as free software. There are now more than 20 packages it has opened up." (http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2768)

Privacy

Michael Zimmer has some important Privacy-related questions to Facebook:

"1. Why aren’t users instructed to review and adjust their privacy settings during the new account creation process? Only if a user happens to click on the tiny “privacy” tag in the upper right corner of the page will they discover how they can control the flow of their personal information.

2. You state “Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information that they may obtain in connection with Platform Applications.” Why not? You have every right and opportunity to screen and approve Platform Developers (note how Apple is controlling third-party iPhone applications), yet you choose not to. How can users trust that if they opt-into a the Zombie application, that these developers aren’t gaining access to all their profile information? Why have you not committed yourself to monitoring and controlling the amount and types of personal information that flows to third-party applications?

3. What kind of clickstream information do you capture with regards to user activities across the Facebook site? How long is it stored? Is it identifiable to the individual user? How is it used, and who is it shared with? (The Privacy Policy is murky about this, as is the norm)

4. What do you mean when you say “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services…in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.” Is Facebook actively searching through non-Facebook sites and media to find more information about users? Is it eavesdropping on instant messaging sessions? Scanning my IM archives? Clipping newspaper articles? This is an extremely unorthodox and unclear statement.

5. Why must users opt-out of having external websites send stories to their profile, as well as from appearing in Social Ads. If you wanted to fully protect user privacy, such “features” should be “opt-in.” (http://michaelzimmer.org/2008/04/06/real-questions-for-facebooks-chief-privacy-officer/)

More Information

Lines of tension between community and governance in Facebook, from Unit Structures blog at http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/were-not-sheep-youre-just-not-paying.html

The delicious tag at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Facebook

The Economics of Privacy at Facebook.

P2P Foundation on Facebook

Facebook

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