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

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?

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: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?

[Garse Janacek]

Well, facebook generally doesn't make the backs of my eyeballs feel like they're on fire, the way the page design on myspace usually does...