Once upon a time, Facebook did not exist. I distinctly remember being a freshman in college and listening to my friend Dan, at the time a sophomore at Georgetown, try to explain Facebook. I was full of awe and wonder. I could access a website that would let me connect with friends at my school and other schools too? When would Loyola College have access to this marvelous thing?
Just take a second to imagine a world without Facebook and then realize, within that world, that something like Facebook could exist.
More distinctly, I remember the day our school gained access to Facebook; I was a sophomore in college, and I joined immediately. I friended my roommates, my classmates, all my childhood and high school friends attending other colleges and universities. My peers were scattered all over the country, and now I could share my life and keep in touch with them easily.
Since then, Facebook has grown to include pretty much everyone: high school students, middle-aged people, employers, small businesses, and high-profile brands. Networks have grown larger. Instead of being part of a network with your classmates, you can belong to a network that includes your entire state!
However, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Facebook is getting rid of regional networks.
…as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
My friend @ckbarrett says, “Facebook needs networks for organizational purposes and, hello, networking!” After reading Zuckerberg’s post and listening to Christine’s complaints, I started to think about Facebook and how its effectiveness for networking.
Sure, regional networks let you see other people who live in your area, but Facebook prevents you from friending too many people at random anyway. Would you like to connect with people in your region? Try to friend them and see what happens – most will probably deny your request. On Twitter, you can follow as many people as you want and expand your online network in a multitude of ways! However, Facebook remains a closed network; it’s a great way to maintain your current networks but not the best way to expand them.
I know from experience that expanding professional and personal networks with Facebook is a fruitless effort. I created a Facebook profile for Too Shy to Stop called TooShy ToStop, and I added myself to the New York, NY network. Within this network, I tried to friend-request other people in the New York, NY network in an effort to gain some exposure and publicity for TStS. Facebook caught on to my plan pretty quickly and blocked me.
Though Facebook is closing off its networks and the ability for people to connect freely, the connecting part was kind of misleading anyway. Users could still set very stringent privacy settings, and no one was obligated to accept a friend request. Zuckerberg’s announcement actually seems like an effort to return to the original purpose of Facebook. Zuckerberg writes, “Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.”
While making the world more open and connected, Facebook has also made the world a smaller place. Networks or not, I am always surprised when I search for a new friend and/or professional contact and find that we have at least one other connection in common. I can’t even tell you how many times this has happened to me and how many times I’ve been endlessly surprised by the few degrees of separation. Facebook has not only helped me keep in touch with people I would never have been able to keep close but it has also helped me overlap my social networks in new and exciting ways.
Though Facebook might not give me a chance to meet new people, it sure does let me catalogue the relationships I have created in real-life and with other social networks like Twitter. And I still haven’t gotten over the giddy feeling I had when I first learned that I could access such a powerful, innovative, and unbelievable tool.
(Photo by David Berkowitz)