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But anyway it’s too late. Whatever harm has been done has probably been scarfed up by the scurrying search engines which have picked up this valuable information while it has been available. What if some unscrupulous operator has already built a private search engine that has traversed Facebook pages and sucked up all of the relationships while they were public. Even if Facebook hides them later on, any such information could be preserved and used by unscrupulous individuals. (And in case you think you can’t build a search engine in a few hours, I built a search engine in 1999 that spiders, on my behalf, any site I point it at… and I could easily configure it to spider Facebook for this kind of information, and have it running on the task within an hour.)

Julia says that Facebook has added the option to protect your friend list (must have happened while I was sleeping). But I can’t find it. I did find a place to restrict what Facebook shows to the search engines, but searchers have ways around that. And there’s an interesting, long post that I found in Valleywag, that deals with some of the intricacies of making your information more difficult to find. It’s worth reading.

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EPIC—the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and nine other co-signing organizations have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about this problem.^[1] Read what Larry Dignan says on ZDNet about this. I investigated and found that we’re all naked now…

I checked my own profile and turned the volume down on some of the privacy settings, but I was unable to restrict my friend list – all 127 of them are freely available to anyone who searches for me on Facebook (not to search engines – just to someone who joins Facebook, but that’s trivial). Now I ask you, do you want the entire world to know who you have friended on Facebook? It exposes your entire set of social connections. I consider my friend list to be much more private than the rest of the info they release. (Though I’m not entirely happy that they show my fan pages, for that matter.)  ¡No way José!

34. Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available
information:”

• users’ names,
• profile photos,
• lists of friends,
• pages they are fans of,
• gender,
• geographic regions, and
• networks to which they belong.38

35. By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to
Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook,
such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you
have not connected with . . . .”39

36. Prior to these changes, only the following items were mandatorily “publicly available
information:”

• a user’s name and
• a user’s network.

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• Less Customization. Yea sure, you can add a few backgrounds and change a couple of fonts; but Twitters ability to customize is nothing compared to Myspace or even Facebook.

[Sky] This is totally on target. If you think back to your first encounter with MySpace (if you indeed had such an encounter) you remember the wild abandon with which people customized their MySpace pages. It was like the wall of your teenage bedroom. (I drew on my wall with magic marker – a desert scene with dunes and a camel caravan all around the room.) So, yes you can’t customize your Twitter page much at all (a single photo) and comeon (!), Twitter isn’t really a web experience – it’s about texting!

• Why Not Text. Pretty much, twitter is just another texting platform. You’re sending out mass texts to all your friends online. Thats cool, but why not just use your new Blackberry to do that

[Sky] Yes, totally! That is the point — Twitter is TXT. The real point of Twitter is that it is real-time. Facebook and MySpace, even though they have feeds, are not fundamentally real-time TXT platforms. Now, I will say that my buddies use Facebook all the time to post photos and share them, pretty much in real time, and I like Facebook much much much more because of this. But what the blogger missed is that plain TXT to your friends is not a group experience, while Twitter is a group TXTing experience! That’s the whole point. You and your followers are participating in a real-time group TXT experience.

• Applications. Facebook and Myspace are filled with all these cool applications teens love, as well as the ability to post countless videos, pictures, and other fun things.

[Sky] Can’t deny it. Facebook is a really rich environment within itself, while on the other hand Twitter is just TXT — except that this is changing daily as new sites are springing up that use the Twitter RSS feed and pull that information together in new ways. As a software architect, I would point out that this is simply a different architecture – the result can be similar.

• Social. In myspace and face book, teens join groups, whether its related to their school, a musical association, or other interest. Twitter doesn’t have that ability for social connections – on twitter, you simply follow or you don’t. Teens like the feeling of cliques and groups, and they like meeting new people without finding out everything they do.

[Sky] I don’t get it, sorry. You can set up your Twitter account so that people need you permission to follow you. If you do that, then you effectively have a group. So what’s the difference? (The difference is that you have to actually do it.)

• Time. Teens aren’t yet in need of a “professional” platform to display their thoughts. Teens are short in time, and the addition of a Twitter account just takes up more of their time. So rather than waste time, they’re content with texting, facebook, and myspace.

[Sky] This is BS. Twitter can be connected to Facebook so that you only have to post one place. It takes no more time to use Twitter than to use Facebook. But, this does point out that teens are as likely as anybody else to be resistant to new popular products — if they see Twitter as just another platform that wastes their time, then they won’t use it. I use Twitter a lot and actually much more than I use Facebook. It’s easy, streamlined, and single-purpose. Maybe I’m more open to innovation than teens are…?

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Here’s one of the best snips from the document:

Many who build technology think that a technology’s feature set is the key to its adoption and popularity. With social media, this is often not the case. There are triggers that drive early adopters to a site, but the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.

This supports what more of us are saying every day “If you build it they probably won’t come.” You can’t believe how many times my customers have looked at me with disbelief (and even fired my consulting firm) because I told them they should adopt an incremental approach rather than launch a full-blown social site on their own.

The uptake of social media is quite different than the uptake of non-social technologies. For the most part, you don’t need your friends to use Word to find the tool useful. You do need your friends to use email for it to be useful, but, thanks to properties of that medium, you don’t need them to be using Outlook or Hotmail to write to them. Many of the new genres of social media are walled gardens, requiring your friends to use that exact site to be valuable.

And my advice on this is “Build your brand and then take your brand to where folks are hanging out.” If they’re on Facebook, then build a Facebook app, or a fan page, rather than trying to get them to come to your website and hang out there.

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