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Facebook Playing With Fire, Again

By clock on September 12, 2006.

Facebook opening up to the masses:

Social networking site Facebook is to ditch its requirement that users must have a university email address, according to media reports.

Facebook required members to have a school or university email address, but added 1,000 approved work addresses in May allowing students that had graduated to continue to access the site.

Removing the need for approved email addresses will put the site in direct competition with other social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster.

My prediction - disaster. It will not just compete against MySpace, it will become MySpace without bells and whistles. What are people on Facebook doing these days (and I can see that via News Feed)? Removing all but the most basic information from their profiles. And that is in order to prev ent their "friends" to see what they are doing. With opening to non-college users, people will be deleting their profiles altogether.

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It's worth noting that Facebook allows you pretty fine-grained control over who can view your profile, depending on what networks you're in. For example, I have my prefs set so that people at my (rather small) school can see all of my info, but people in my city can only see that I have a profile. Friends, of course, can see everything.

I'm assuming that open email addresses will only be able to join city networks and that verified addresses will be required to join work and school networks. If so, it wouldn't much change things for me.

There damn well better be an option to prevent non-college users from looking at my profile. If not, I'm done with it. Which is a damn shame.