Exclusivity used to be Facebook's greatest strength. You could post photos of yourself getting drunk in the dorms without worrying that your parents would find out. Now that Facebook has gone mainstream, a competitor could attack Facebook by offering privacy within well-defined real-world communities, authenticating membership by email address, IP address or moderator approval.
Yes but before you can try to solve that problem, you first have to solve the problem of critical mass. Facebook did it by first being a club that not anyone could join (e.g. Ivy League and its foreign equivalents) and then relied on those people spreading out into the world.
Consider Flickr - it's a great tool for photographers. But it's not socially useful; all your non-photographer friends can't be tagged in photos. Can they solve that problem? Or can Last.FM? They already have events and a social graph, they just don't have a way to get the rest of people's activity. Basically no-one is going to join a social network that they don't think they can get their friends to sign up to.
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
Isn't that what Google Me plans on doing? These well-defined real-world communities would consist of a friend group, a family group, and a work group. All types of shared information would be classified into one of these groups and be visible to only those within that specific group.
Also, what about niche social networks? Linkedin seems to have conquered the professional social network. Facebook seems strongest in the friend category. To me it seems awkward having family and friends in the same Facebook network. Perhaps a niche family social network could succeed...
I used to think that any kind of data management in FB-like site would boil down to a friend list. I even had dozens of lists in orkut back when i gave lots of energy to that site, but it turns out lists are weirdly inappropriate to this kind of thing. I mean, i do have some lists in my FB, and i will dutifully file every single new contact. But it turns out not to be too useful!
Now i think that maybe "lists" have bad orthogonality to what people want to do. They seem to make sense from a DB perspective, from inside the system, but they miss the point by so little that they actually cloud the issue. Weirdly enough.
My current guess is that it boils down to identity management. I would like not to classify friends, but to manage "personas", like masks or roles that i play. For example "student" or "employee" or, you know, "night life". It is more like a sub-profile than like a list of friends, though. This would obviously involve a list of friends, maybe it could only involve a list of friends, but still...
Definitely an area where more experiments would be needed.
Facebook doesn't make it easy though. With 1000+ friends, I'd rather not sit down for 12 hours and try to categorize them.
Surely they can atleast guess for me (based on who I share friends with, when we became friends, whether we went to school or lived in the same city at the same time, etc.). If FB would give me a draft to review, then I'd try sorting through my friends.
If they don't, then I simply won't share many things that I might like to share, just because it has to be broadcast to everyone.
If you have over 1000 friends I'm not surprised Facebook is difficult for you to use. 1000 friends is a frighteningly large auditorium of people. Facebook is far more usable at or under about 100 friends.
I'm very late to this thread, but I think this suggests perhaps the biggest problem that Facebook has:
Because the act of 'defriending' someone has such strong negative social connotations, it will continue to be very uncommon, and as a result the number of friends any given user has is increasing monotonically. I've had Facebook for years, and by friend count has steadily increased and is now nearing 900. The users who only have 100 friends now will eventually be in the unmanageable and uncomfortable position of having 1000 friends, and by that point I won't be surprised if my count is approaching 1500.
Facebook certainly seems to want everyone to have as many friends as possible (note the friend suggestion features), so it's only a matter of time before everyone is presenting themselves to such a large auditorium.
I was trying to clean out my friends list today on FB and it's clear that FB do not want you to do that (for obvious reasons). The only way I could seem to remove them was to click into each friend and click "Remove from my friends". It takes so long and was so tedious I just gave up!
I'm a little late to this thread but I'm trying to address this particular shortcoming with my startup, swytch.net
Users can have multiple profiles for each of the groups they communicate with e.g. one for family, one for friends and one for colleagues.
The privacy settings are also very simple. Public or private. Only followers get access to private profiles so you don't have to worry about friends of friends seeing something you don't want them to.
Currently under heavy development but a beta is up at http://www.swytch.net for anyone who wants to have a look
Parents like that it's widespread because they can find old friends, but the site becomes less trendy when High School and College student's parents are using it. They need to pick either being widespread or being exclusive, but they can't be both.
"They can't be both" doesn't really mean anything. They are both. Their user base is still growing, and almost none of the people who vowed to "leave facebook" have actually done it. Some have, but very, very, very few.
As the other commenter said, they aren't both. They've chosen to be more widespread. This means that their user base is still growing, but from what I've heard it's mainly older people. I'm starting to hear from other High School students that they aren't interested in Facebook anymore, which was surprising but I can see why now.
