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Posted on: July 15, 2009 1:40 AM, by Razib Khan

Wired had a long piece on Facebook's attempt to challenge Google. The gist seems to be that just as Google revolutionized the way search was done via PageRank, so Facebook will revolutionize search though results generated via one's personal "Social Graph." I'm generally skeptical of this idea in relation to Facebook, though my skepticism has more to do with the assumption that the value of a social network declines as it becomes less exclusive. In the Wired piece the author suggests that Facebook has reached the penetration at which positive feeback loops begin to occur. Perhaps. But it seems that the bigger Facebook gets, to the point where most of the "internet" is on Facebook, the less of one's personal information one is going to put out there. In other words, I believe that the amount of valuable social information will begin to rise far slower than the number of people who are on Facebook because many joiners will join simply to view other people's profiles as opposed to putting themselves out there, at which point others may begin to mimic that sort of free-riding behavior.

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Comments

You are right. The early adopters of Facebook - college students, then highschoolers, then techies, bloggers and marketers - put a lot of information on their profiles. But the recent boom of Facebook users is largely made up of non-techie people of my generation and older whose profiles are barebones empty.

Also, compared to Twitter or FriendFeed, Facebook is closed (people need to friend each other to see stuff) and unsearchable.

Posted by: Coturnix | July 15, 2009 2:02 AM

This seems to be a key reason why places like the NYTimes are reporting that FB plans on turning everything "public" by default and making you explicitly hide things, rather than as it has been (and how it attracted people up 'til now) with everything private and users explicitly opening it up beyond their "friends".

of course, this is the sort of thing that FB users only find out because their friends are sharing the nytimes article, not because FB is actually *telling* us anything.

Posted by: Joe Shelby | July 15, 2009 9:23 AM

Yeah, just what Coturnix said.

Facebook would be great if I was still in school and all my friends were one big undifferentiated blob but now I'm a grownup with friends ranging from those old college (and high school) buddies to professional friends of my wife's. Not much content I can put up that spans that range so my profile is pretty empty.

I've even heard from a 22 year old employee that now that her grandmother and her friends' grandmothers are getting on Facebook, she and her friends had to stop putting up party pictures and the like. So it's not just oldsters like me noticing this.

Posted by: Brent Michael Krupp | July 15, 2009 1:06 PM

You might enjoy this anecdote, about teenagers turning from Facebook to Twitter, for, of all things, the privacy it provides from snooping parents, teachers, etc:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/11/twitter_is_for.html

Posted by: David Crotty | July 16, 2009 11:08 AM