Social networking sites are huge. Companies like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others invite you to input data about yourself, and then make it easy for you to invite members of your various social networks to view your information.
For a quick and painless introduction to social networks, check out the clever video “Social Networking in Plain English,” from the folks at Common Craft (www.commoncraft.com). Bottom line, social networking sites encourage you to document the connections you have to other people, letting you see the network that exists through those connections, and their connections and so on.
How big is the social networking phenomenon? Well, it was big enough last October for Microsoft to invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent interest in Facebook, which one might interpret as meaning Facebook is worth $15 billon or so. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation paid $580 million to acquire MySpace in July 2005 and now estimates the company’s value may be as high as $6 billion. It’s hard to support these valuations, but clearly, some smart people think there’s economic potential in the social networking biz. One very simple reason is traffic: Each of these sites has millions of visitors each month.
Each social networking site (there are more than 200) has a distinct focus. LinkedIn is oriented toward business people and calls attention to the size of your network at each degree of separation. For example, my LinkedIn homepage shows 44 LinkedIn users that I’ve connected to directly. Through them, I’m connected to more than 4,700 people (with two degrees of separation) and, by extension, more than half a million people by six degrees of separation. You can argue the value of those half million distant connections, but my extended network is more visible and potentially more useful as a result.
MySpace is much less serious, with a focus on fun with your friends and music. You can “friend” someone, which lets you follow the activities they post on their MySpace page. Musical groups have created pages to create communities of their listeners. It’s a very open, customizable environment that appeals to teenagers and their friends. It can also be surprising (as a parent, I joined MySpace so I could friend my child and keep up with her world on her terms), and it’s certainly visually noisy (MySpace encourages self-expression by allowing members to customize their pages as they see fit).
Facebook grew out of the “face book” provided at some schools and colleges, which contains basic information about everyone in your class, including a picture (I still have mine on a bookshelf at home). Originally, Facebook was limited to college students (it started at Harvard), but it’s now opened its doors to everyone.
Here’s where the story gets more interesting. Facebook has provided an Applications Programming Interface (API) to its service. In other words, it’s made it possible to write programs that “talk” to Facebook in certain defined ways. This lets third parties create applications that use the information about your social network you have stored on Facebook (and the information that people make available to you as part of your network). This is one of the reasons that Facebook (and other sites with APIs) are interesting investments. By making it possible for others to build “on top of” your site, you create an entire ecosystem, which encourages growth. Applications using Facebook’s API let you share horoscopes, pictures, quizzes, surveys and other things. Take a look at www.facebook.com/applications for an idea of how varied these applications are.
There are a couple of potential downsides to Facebook and other websites that invite you to store information. First, there’s the issue of trust. If you’re part of my network, and I share my birthdate with you, what prevents you from giving that information to someone else? It’s not about computer security, because this same issue exists offline. It’s a question of who I trust with my information. A second, related issue is the question of who owns my online information.
These issues became a lot more visible recently. A well-known blogger, Robert Scoble, has 5,000 Facebook connections (people willingly connect with Scoble because of his online fame). He’s also using another social networking site, called Plaxo, which has a feature that lets you import information about your contacts from other services. Scoble was beta-testing a new Plaxo feature that lets you import your Facebook contacts when Facebook promptly shut down Scoble’s account.
Scoble raised a ruckus in the blogging world about being denied access to “his” data. Facebook reinstated his account as a result, but this highlights the liability of storing your data with any online provider. Many websites and services don’t provide a way to export the data you’ve stored, because then you aren’t locked into their service: You can take your data and go somewhere else with it. For example, if you post reviews of books you’ve read on Amazon.com, there’s no easy way to move them to other book review sites you may join. Because your data is locked, you have little recourse if a company goes out of business or intentionally kicks you off its site.
But what about Scoble? He was taking people’s information and moving it somewhere else without their permission. What if those people trust Facebook but not Plaxo? Whose data is it?
In a perfect world, all your personal information would be stored in digital form in a magic black box that you controlled. Anyone who wanted a piece of your personal information—from your birthdate to Social Security number (SSN)—would have to ask the box for permission to use it every time. For example, a credit agency wouldn’t store your SSN, it would store the address of your little black box and have to ask it for your SSN. You could decide what information to share with each entity that requested it each time they requested it.
But even in that perfect world, you have no privacy. If someone requests your SSN once and copies it down, you no longer have control over it. As Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, famously said, “You have no privacy. Get over it.” The new world of social networking is making everyone more aware of privacy, security and, most of all, trust.
