Robert Scoble Lets Everyone Be His Facebook Friend, Why I Think He’s Silly
June 25, 2007
I was wasting time on Facebook this weekend, as I am apt to do when I saw that Robert Scoble had updated his Twitter to read:
I’m adding everyone as my Facebook Friend. Join here: http://tinyurl.com/2zcme6
Another one of my friends, Brandon Paddock replied:
@scobleizer, that’s kind of defeating the purpose… Facebook is so great because it’s people you actually know!
I really agree with Brandon on this one, as I wrote on Twitter. But since I’d like to have more than 140 characters to explain why, I’m writing a blog post about it.
Basically, Facebook is wonderful because it creates virtual maps of actual, real-world connections. It’s just like LinkedIn because it assumes that when someone becomes friends with someone else, they are endorsing that person. A friend request is a request for an endorsement. It’s a way to reach out and say, “hey, tell the world that I’m really an OK person.”
Now, that’s not to say that I won’t accept you as a friend if you ping me on Facebook. But if the connection isn’t obvious, you should at least write me a note. I actually friended Stowe Boyd the other day without writing him a note and he wrote back to say, “do I know you?” I felt like such a dimwit.
The real-world nature of the connections on Facebook is about privacy as much as about endorsements. Facebook’s privacy settings are the gold standard for social networks because they are so granular. And even at the most open, there is no way to make your profile visible to every single person.
Those privacy settings enable, rather than inhibit the “social grid” that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about in his f8 keynote. A new user on the network adds value for all the users because his presence makes his friends more likely to update their profiles more frequently. This creates a ripple effect across the social grid.
What’s more, Facebook users are actually more likely to update their accounts frequently because they know that only their friends can see what they’ve done. I’m much (MUCH!) more cautious what I put on my MySpace than I am about Facebook. Why? Because I know each and every person on my Facebook. MySpace is a complete crap shoot.
Now, Scoble can use Facebook however the heck he wants. It’s his profile and his life. But if you’re a friend of his and you don’t want a lot of exposure, you might want to change your privacy settings to reflect that you don’t want friends of friends to be able to see your profile.
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I knew this but I wasn’t sure so I had to go crosscheck. Facebook doesn’t allow friends of your friends to see your profile. If you go to the privacy page: http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=profile you can change your privacy settings. The biggest graph of people who can see your profile are those in your networks and your friends. And that applies to almost everything on the site. Some things are obviously limited to only friends. So Scoble doing that doesn’t affect anyone but him…
There is more than one way to use Facebook, and Scoble’s is perfectly acceptable, even if you and I might frown at it a little bit. In the context of Robert Scoble, his approach seems quite understandable. For us? Probably wouldn’t fly.
You do realize that “Allow friends of friends to see my profile” is not, and has never been, an option on facebook, right?
You have three options when deciding who to allow to see your profile:
1. All of my networks and all of my friends
2. Some of my networks and all of my friends
3. Only my friends.
So, privacy FUD aside, there’s just no way for Scoble’s friends to view your profile by virtue of your FOAFness.
Ola & Pete: I see that there isn’t a setting for that anymore, but at some point I remember Facebook having a privacy settling that allowed friends of friends who were also within your networks see certain things about you. I think the idea was to use people’s degrees of social closeness determine what was available.
Perhaps as Facebook has evolved, they decided that that function was no longer necessary. My bad!
Sam: Definitely not frowning at Scoble, more like…teasing him gently. I think it’s fine any way he wants to use Facebook, I guess I’m just commenting on the way that some newcomers to the site are using it from the perspective of someone who was involved when it was still only for students and recent alums.
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That may be — although I’ve been a member for a long time and I don’t recall anything like that, and it’s something that I think I would use a lot.
Now, if someone is IN YOUR NETWORK, the default (I think) is that you can see each other and when I first joined I don’t think you could even turn that off. That’s a little foggy to me, though.
I also wonder if you’re familiar with the “limited profile” options — it wouldn’t really accomplish all of your goals but you can exclude a group of people from a wide array of things.
Pete: Yeah. I know all about the limited profile. But honestly, I use it for people who I know from high school but don’t really care to let into my life. If I un-friended them, it would cause more drama than it’s worth. But I also don’t want them to see even as much as my co-workers could.
Right… I have never used the limited profile… what I do know is that the kind of hyper-granular privacy controls you’re suggesting would be very, very difficult to produce and maintain in a scalable, centralized way. Although if they were practical I bet they’d be awesome.
I have to wonder, though, don’t you think exercising some of those choices would cause some drama, too? “So I heard Joe can see your pictures on facebook, why can’t I?”
You can see photos of a friend of friend if your friend comments, I guess.
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