Slashdot Mirror
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.
How is this different than MySpace now? other than the fact that now sexual predators know that a majority of the memebers are coeds?
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
Latin, motherf*cker, do you speak it?!
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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?
...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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I bet there's going to be a merger at some point. Coming soon: FaceSpace!
Insert Sig Here
Look at what I found just this morning, what a coincidence: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1707663. That is also why I try not put any personal information on the web.
I'm much removed from the social networking sites such as FaceBook (by time) and MySpace (by desire) but it seemed to me that the main advantage of FaceBook was that it was a relatively safe place for HS and College students to meet and interact.
Now, with the addition of millions of potential users, it seems (as others have said) that the site should become MyFaceBook.
Why can't site operators (even those that pay millions for established market share) realize that they can make a reasonable profit within niche markets? That was the entire purpose behind the original "Virtual Community" concept of the late 90s. People can belong to multiple niches and can receive targeted messages based on the site they are currently visiting.
I could keep moaning and bitching, but it would just lead to a rant...
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
A group of students decided to replace Facebook with a student built and operated site... If Facebook really has lost touch with its userbase, perhaps these guys can offer a decent alternative to MySpace/Facebook for students. http://digg.com/software/Outraged_Students_Replace _Facebook
I signed up, it's a little low on features, but they've only had a week. I think it's something to keep an eye on.
-Dorango
It's beyond me wy Facebook is doing something like this a a week after pissing of at least a ninth of its active membership. Last week browising all the outrage groups that sprung up, many people said that they felt the site lost its way when it let High School students join. While allowing outside access to Facebook is quite clearly the best buisness route to take, the question that comes up is whether or not it alienates its original niche? The immediate answer is no; college sutdents still will use Facebook. But what Facebook fails to remember is that college students (and society in general) are fickle. While you may have them all today, if you make a series of wrong moves and then something (better?) comes along, they'll all ditch you like roadkill.
An enlightenment painter would paint a grand house on a lawn; A romantic painter would paint it on fire.
was the fact it NEEDED my university email to allow me to join. My school doesnt allow allum to have free email addresses, only students. While its cheap to get it, I saw no need to have a 5th email address. But facebook refused to let me sign up as a allum without one, so I said fuck it. Maybe if they would understand that not all schools allow thier students to keep emails then maybe more people might sign up to it.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm a college student on Facebook (yes, I'm sure you can find the profile if you look, there's nothing bad on there). I know that I, and many of my facebook friends are in these geographic regions networks as well as college networks. I'm in the Washington, DC one, for example, so that means that now people who just live in DC can view my profile, not just college or high school students from DC. I don't think most college kids realize that.
Great. Now I get to be harrassed by townies on the Internet, too. Profile = private.
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
> No one can browse all 9 million registered users.
Except of course, for the site owners, and the government. Thanks to GW and the DHS, the government has access to all of Myspace, facebook, friendster, etc. Because you know terrorists are big on facebook. They like to create groups like "Facebook is for infidels" and "I just started a jihad 5 minutes ago".
Consider anything you put on there easily enough open to anybody. It's not difficult to create university email addresses, which is why places, fake celebrities, and even people's pets and "Delicious Beer" can create profiles on facebook (although facebook has been removing pets and inanimate object profiles).
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
You can join regional networks once you're already a member, but you can not sign up through a regional network yet. The drop-down box still only lists: college, high school and work as candidates.
Good thing you added in that parentheseed part, you almost got added as a friend to a bunch of middle aged nerds' user pages!