Facebook Opening Up For The Public

Krishna Dagli writes to mention a BusinessWeek article about a move by Facebook to open up to the public. Up until now, in order to join Facebook you had to be an alumnus from certain High Schools, Colleges, or companies. Soon, individuals living in any one of 500 'geographic regions' can sign up. From the article: "People who joined Facebook because it was primarily a school-focused network may feel that it's losing a key distinction. As with the 'news feed' announcement, reception to this overhaul will come down to how well Facebook communicates. For the average student at New York University, for instance, little changes. The only people who can browse his profile before were other NYU students and that will stay the same. The change simply allows for 500 new groups to form that all operate independently on the Facebook platform. No one can browse all 9 million registered users." Update: 09/12 16:29 GMT by Z : Fixed latin conjugation. Mrs. Tomlinson would be so proud.

Comments

No more open than it was before

[finkployd]

People, if you have no caught on to this yet, a lot of employers have people at a lot of schools pulling facebook profiles for their HR dept. Some undergrad they pay, nephew of the CEO attending classes, a staff member, whatever. Your facebook profile WILL be seen outside of the fantasy restrictions you think facebook puts on it. They are under no obligation to honor those restrictions anyway, they could open up the whole thing tomorrow to the world and there is nothing you can do about it. The content you put on it is theirs, not yours, and they can license it to whomever they want or distribute it as they see fit. Read the ToS agreement.

Finkployd

Re:No more open than it was before

[garcia]

This goes for anything that you post publically including your blog, your gallery, your Slashdot posts, your old usenet posts, your random Dodgeball history, etc.

Be aware of what you are posting out there and that it is likely that it will be archived *forever* in some way for others to look at.

We're not all going to get off as scott free as Arnold, Bill, and George when we're looking for a job and someone has evidence of our past history in hand.

Re:No more open than it was before

[aussersterne]

Ahhh, once again someone suggests that we should all hide our personhood behind the facade of "vanilla-flavored, grey-colored worker" in order to sustain a living. Well you don't live forever, folks. So if you make nothing to leave behind you now but the pinstripes on your suit, that's all that will remain of you once you're gone.

I got on the subway this morning with just such a pack of yes-men. I couldn't tell them apart. Suits, hairdos, shiny little shoes, bland ties. They are all dead, unimportant, lost to history, no matter how big their bank accounts. They don't even matter to their friends or families beyond being "breadwinner." They could just as easily be any other hollow suit.

No thanks. If you want me to be a hollow suit, I don't want to work for you. Take your money and go rape the third world somewhere.

Re:No more open than it was before

[ericspinder]

So I guess the lesson is, the Internet can completely ruin your reputation, and close doors where you wouldn't expect it to.

The second lesson is that names are not unique. If you didn't have corroborating evidence of his identity, such as SS number, age, previous addresses, it's just as likely that you held one man to account for another man's poor reputation.

There are background checks available on the Internet which are fairly 'cheap' (well, a lot cheaper than 2 months of back rent), and I would highly suggest one before you take a random stranger off of the street. Just before you have the right information, such as age and previous addresses.

No one?

[cerberusss]

No one can browse all 9 million registered users."

No one, except the owning company.

We don't need another Myspace

[thoriphes]

There are already sites like MySpace and Friendster in the scene, we don't need Facebook to become one of them. The beauty of Facebook was that it was somewhat of a closed community where people were on the same level, if you will. College is a society on its own and Facebook allows the sharing of a lot of commonalities and close-knit ties with people in your campus as well as others. If you open the floodgates for the public, you'll just bring in an onslaught of stalkers (the newsfeed only makes things worse). There's already been quite the resentment for allowing high-schoolers to sign up for Facebook, what now for the common public?

Let me sum it up by saying...

[Billosaur]

...whoop-dee-dooooo! If you find some use for it, great, but the fact is, I can build my own personal web site to do all the communicating with others I need, and I can control the content, and I don't have to worry about the vagueries of someone deciding to change the rules. Facebook, like MySpace, is overrated.

Re:This is differnt?

[keyshawn632]

Eh, besides the ability to make your profile really tacky by having a god-awful color scheme, flash, and a music stream; only noticible difference [between facebook and myspace] that I see is that you must 'friend' the other person in order to see their entire profile.

However, If you're not their 'friend', their name still comes up in the search engine and you can still see their name, school, a profile picture/avatar, and who they have listed as their friends. Although the information coming up in the search engine seems like a bit much, you can configure it so that your information does not come up in the search engine.
The caveat with that, though, is that no one outside of your school network can make a friend request to you. You would have to initiate all friend requests.

As a college student and facebook user, Facebook jumped the shark a long time ago .
(adding high school, companies onto there, the status updates...)

I'm not looking forward to having random middle-aged men sending me friend requests on facebook (I got these even as a male on myspace, and the college ladies will have their inboxes filled... *shudders*)

Re:This is differnt?

[dfghjk]

Didn't know the victim had to be underage for someone to be a "sexual predator".

Re:have to be student/alumnus to see profile

[finkployd]

Riiiight. So please re-read my post.

Employers can easily find an alumnus (thank you for using the correct plural btw), current student, or staff member, who for a fee (or just because they are friends) will print/save-to-pdf/cut-and-past/etc. job applicant's profiles. Do YOU trust every single person in your university with a university email address?

Finkployd

Re:Facebook's lost touch with its users

[ceejayoz]

That's like saying that something better than Slashdot is coming, and then posting a Geocities link.

Re:"An alumni"?

[operagost]

Not only that, but you don't need to be an alumnus-- you can be an undergraduate. It was my impression that most of the Facebook users are undergrads.