Facebook's Information Bubble

Economists generally warn us about bubbles, where the pressure of growth exceeds underlying fundamentals; once speculation sets it the bubble becomes an attractive nuisance, and when the bubble pops it leaves a lot of people suffering, except for the smart ones who know enough to get out early.

Facebook has become an information bubble. It knows so much about so many people, but the real treasure is that it knows who your network is. This accumulation of glommed data is a marketer's fantasy come true. And yet, Facebook has not found a way to make money.

This week's New York Times artice, The Three Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now, is notable for a few reasons. To myself it's notable in that it's lifted, word for word, from its original position on Read Write Web. Usually the Grey Lady does not simply repurpose content from another source without explicitly acknowledging the provenance, but perhaps times are changing.

The most important thing about the article is its urgency and its degree of specificity; click this, hover there, choose this. This sort of specific guidance from a source with geek credibility is commendable.

IANAF (I am not a Facebook-er), but I've had friends show me what they do on Facebook. I haven't tried it because I'm concerned it's a lot like doing heroin, one flirtation and you're hooked. That seems to be the case among people I know.

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to his Facebook page so I could see his avatar image. I also saw the avatars of a dozen of his friends. Being somewhat geeky, I pressed Shift/F5, the page refreshed, and I saw another dozen friends. I did that a few times and realized that anybody can sequence through all of any Facebooker's friends.

I followed a few of the links, because I know some of his friends. On their Facebook pages, I found other people I knew among their friends - these would be "co-friends". I found I could even drill down to friends-cubed, third-level friends. This is sort of the opposite of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.



The thing that concerns me is that people are loading their information about themselves and their friends into Facebook, assuming that FB is (1) benign, (2) cost-free, and (3) sustainable. The problem is that eventually, Facebook is going to have to make money.

When a guy with a forest needs money, he sells firewood.
When an Afghan farmer needs money, he sells opium.
When a company with your information needs money, they sell your information.

In his new book, Jarod Lanier writes regarding Facebook, "The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up".

"The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view," Lanier writes, "is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."

Facebook users are giving this Corporation most of their key information. Facebookers that take surveys and complete profiles give even more information that helps FB assign them to various demographic profiles.

When Facebook goes bankrupt, a few interesting things will happen. Their assets will be reorganized and used in the most financially beneficial way. What's interesting is that the Facebook privacy policy and privacy guarantee evaporate into vapor at the moment of bankruptcy. When the Facebook bubble bursts, the privacy policy pops too.

There will be a bidding war for FaceBook's database, which will become more valuable in bankrupcty (free of the privacy policy) than it ever was during Facebook's tenure.

The smartest thing for the buyer of the database to do would be to immediately reintroduce the Facebook service, encouraging Facebookers to continue contributing and updating their information, only now without the same privacy policy.

Facebook Username Landrush Debacle

Recently Facebook allowed people to register "vanity plate URLs" as their usernames. If you wanted and nobody else had claimed it, you could be "JennyDeluxe", or whatever struck your fancy.

At midnight Eastern time, Facebook members could pick user names for their profile URL’s that actually make sense, in place of the previous nonsensical numerical ones. (The numerical addresses look like this — http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130 — which is also the Facebook page explaining the procedure.) To prevent name-squatting, people will not be able to sell or reassign usernames.



To say that it was a circus is to underestimate the land rush. As the registration system slowed down with the onslaught of requests, and as "not available" responses grew after the first easy claims were staked out, wits realized that Facebook Username can be abberviated "FU" and twitters on #FUFacebook become a trend.



As more and more common names were snatched up, frustration grew and blogs about The Facebook Username Debacle multiplied. Anil Dash blogs,

A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, realizes he will never get a representative username, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames Debacle.

That is one of the funniest things I've read about geeks and race. Admittedly, it's a narrow focus.

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Tuesday: Firefox 3.5 available for download. This was originally called 3.1 a long time ago, but so many changes - most notably a much faster Javascript engine - have been packed into this update, they decided to go to 3.5.

Divorce 2.0 : Who Gets the Facebook Friends?

Divorce is ugly. It makes everybody poor or more poor, it makes everything more complex, and it strains all the assumptions. It's interesting to contrast the Atlantic Monthly's sanguine 1966 article on divorce and their 1993 article on the same topic.

What happens to the Friends of the two divorcees ? Friends choose sides. If you know the wife, she's the victim; if you know the husband, he's the victim. One's the dumper, one's the dumpee.


Whichever one you know, the divorcees quickly lose many of their friends, especially their married friends. There's too many dynamics; the divorcees can't settle who gets who along with the rest of the settlement, because the non-combatants may have their own preferences.

It's awkward for married couples to maintain relationships with newly divorced friends. The end result is married people tend to let their friendships with divorcees fall into benign neglect, withdrawing their support when it may be needed most.


Usually as technology changes, the old social conventions carry into the new world, with some accomodation to the new techniques. However, as Etiquette morphs into Netiquette, as we move from RealLife™ into SecondLife, current practice increasingly doesn't match traditional good behavior.

One company laid off 400 people via email. A man announced he was leaving his wife by updating his facebook status to "single". A man broke up with his lover by updating his Wikipedia entry.

What about Friends 2.0? When you break up, and you're both on people's FaceBook friends list, who gets unfriended? What's the protocol?

A Divorce 2.0 Twist on an Age-Old Problem

None of this is new. For all our modern sophistication, there's really very little new under the sun. However, I recently saw a new twist on the age-old "Friends-Divorce" conundrum, in an online query written to Slate's Advice Column, Dear Prudence:

Erie, Pa.: I am currently in the process of divorcing my husband after 7 years of an abusive marriage. Since my ex and I have children together, I would still like to keep things moderately friendly with his family. My predicament is this: I am Facebook friends with all of my in-laws. Is there a polite way to de-friend them so I can have a life not monitored by the ex's family? Emily Yoffe: Here's what I don't understand about Facebook. Since it's so public a medium, why would you post things on it you wouldn't be willing to let all the people you've friended see? Are you going to post about the people you're dating, etc? (Why?) In any case, it's your page and if it makes you feel squeamish to have ex-in laws on it, just defriend them. I don't think matrimonial law has dealt with custody of Facebook friends yet. In a subsequent post, a helpful person posted this advice-- Re: Facebook, to defriend or not?: You can defriend. They don't get notified. If you want to keep them on, though, you can change your privacy settings so they basically don't see anything. Or only certain things. Have a teenager or college-aged student show you. Emily Yoffe: Good advice. Another reminder of why it's worth it to have children.

Wow. There's big things going on: abuse, divorce, children. Here's the big predicament she needs help with: How do I skank around online without my mother-in-law knowing? And the wisdom of the crowd replies: get that kid of yours to change your privacy settings.

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LINKS TO TECHNICAL REFERENCES

• Original documentation
• Windows Vista Knowledge Base report
• Support Guidelines