Social Networks

You are probably aware of the Dunbar number - Prof Robin Dunbar calculates that we find it very hard to handle more than about 150 functioning relationships with other people. I recall discussing this with J P Rangaswami, whether the lowering of transaction costs on Social Networks, and the ability to electronically manage a social network could increase it. We both though it probably could.

However, Prof Dunbar has done some research on social networks and found the 150 number still holds:

Dunbar is now studying social networking websites to see if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings. Preliminary results suggest it has not.

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” said Dunbar.

“People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.

“There is a big sex difference though ... girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.”
I was initially scratching my head - how can you not have an increase in a Dunbar number with reduced transaction costs? Then I worked out what was happening (I think). Reduced transaction costs allow you to recruit new friends very rapidly, but the social networking software on its own does not help manage them, the brain needs algorithms that augment it in automating management of a larger social circle - for example by say flagging when you haven't spoken to someone in say 2 months so send a message, etc etc. I am sure it will be a fairly fruitful area of research going forward.

All we have to do is work out how the girls do it and build an expert system to automate that

Anil Dash is the latest to call for the service layer to be as failure proof as the infrastructure layer on the Internet, rather than be concentrated in a few companies (see Don't let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town) over here. He writes:

There's no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We've just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.

Rescue organizations and charities should simply be able to use the Web sites they already have to deliver those messages.

And wasn't that the promise of the Web in the first place? Weren't we going to stop relying on individual companies as gatekeepers for communication? When blogs took off a few years ago, wasn't it with the promise that we'd all be able to share our voices without having to ask any company for permission? Why did we give that up?

So why can't we have Open Social Networks, like we have Open ISPs. Why can't I just pay an addendum to my ISP and get my SocNet stuff, which interfaces to your SocNet stuff over open standards? As Anil points out, we have been here before:

Ten years ago, otherwise-sensible companies were paying millions of dollars to America Online to buy "AOL keywords." These were shortcuts to parts of the AOL service, which dominated U.S. Internet access at the time. In fact, many of us have allowed companies to become intermediaries to all our communications, whether it was AOL 10 years ago or Facebook today.
.....

Think how ludicrous it would seem for someone to decide, say, to offer emergency services as an AOL keyword called "911" instead of having people just dial their phones?

Imagine having to have an address for my company - or myself - on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc. Ludicrous! His point as to the "why" they've stitched it up today applied to how it was done in the early days:

Maybe it's because they made it look so easy.

I think thats a big part - take any major Open Source project, what you will find is everyone likes to the interesting, fun stuff. No one likes to do the Nth iteration on the blah-button on page 234-b to get it working just that little bit better. Its a sad but true fact that Open Source User Experienes and Interfaces usually suck a lot more than commercial ones. It took quite a few years (it needed Mr Andreessen et al, not just Sir Tim) before even mainstream Geeks could run with the Open Internet.

Also, at 3am on a Sunday morning, Open Source guys by and large don't want to fix a bug in some sap's application becuase its gone doewn, Sh*tty jobs like that give no kudos. So O/S SLAs are crap, you either need to have in-house resource or have a big guy guarantee it (Linux only really took off when Red Hat etc.

But these are not insurmountable issues. Why can't an Open Source world build an Open Social Network for everyone to use? Its technically feasible, and imagind the benefits:

- Communications systems that favour open connections, not walled gardens
- Privacy rules that favour users, not advertisers and dataminers
- A rich application ecosystem

Can't be that hard - get an OS Social Media system, run it up on Amazon, get some NFP funding to pay people to run it and write a useable UI....

It could be a service that is as ubiquitous as email, you get it when you sign up to your ISP. You would pay for it as part of your monthly fee. In the early days it may be a Not-For-Profit that sets it up but you could soon federate/franchise it to other qualified bodies to run.

There are two developing trends emerging in social networks, both trying to solve the problems that the current ones like Facebook have - ie they cannot get enough information about your high value behaviour to make for high value Ad serving, nor is mining your data really worthwhile as the really useful stuff isn't really there. Flying Sheep and so on don't really cut it.

The game in Free-to-use Social Media is to be able to estimate your near future Net Present Value and intentions, for Advertising and datamining purposes. So they need to get a better handle on your more valuable transactions (throwing sheep is not where it is). The ways out of this dilemma are fairly obvious:

(i) Get more data about you

But we believe Location based social networks get a whole lot more data about you than a pure social network or search engine does, as it can cross reference your location to a whole lot of other datasets rather than just your social net, Also, real time movement data allows a whole lot more valuable projections and predictions to be made about you.

Of these sorts of systems, we believe games based ones are the most powerful at extracting user data as:

(i) They reward users for data disclosure with in-game treasures - status promotion, electronic goods, privileges

(ii) By involving users in a game type environment, we hypothesise they can override natural caution and rational reluctance on data disclosure

This combination of reward and breaking down barriers will be able to get people to share far more personal data than any other type. Also, games are seen as "good" or at least harmless - witness the Foursquare/Harvard deal - as Blown to Bits notes:

Having spent many an afternoon over the past year in information security meetings, where the University has been developing policies and standards for how information about our students may be accessed, stored, and moved, I immediately started wondering whether Harvard had somehow signed onto a deal to encourage students to surrender their privacy, and if so, who was the commercial beneficiary. The Gazette story doesn’t mention data privacy at all. It simply has a Harvard spokesman echoing foursquare’s utopianism.

We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use.

So visiting high school students and Chinese tourists are apparently also the intended “beneficiaries” of this “service.”

As Hal Roberts of the Berkman Center pointed out when I asked him about this story, foursquare’s privacy policy is pure boilerplate:

We receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with our Service or services. Foursquare automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser including your IP address, cookie information, and the page you requested.

It goes on to explain how they aggregate this data and analyze it, and how they won’t disclose it in a way that would identify you personally. Only problem is, the privacy policy doesn’t mention the really private information foursquare collects—the location information. That simply isn’t covered by any of the boilerplate. So they can do what they want with it, without asking.

The interesting thing, as he notes, is that they have managed Harvard to use it despite all the internal work on student privacy and the lack of any protections in the T&As.

Games are also a better way of selling online goods, espaecially if they help you perform better in the game and thus win even more prizes and status.


(ii) Go for the jugular - get you to share your financial data online

There have been personal savings services that have done this for quite a few years, but they have been "first generation" - ie they aggregate and anonymise all the data and there is very little "social" in the network. But more recently, a number of services are launching persuading you to share your purchases with your friends and neighbours in a more social way - Bundle for example, which to get you started wants (From ReadWriteWeb):

To get started, you just enter your location, age, income and whether you are married, single or have kids. Bundle will then create an infographic that represents the spending habits of similar households in your neighborhood. From there, you can drill down deeper into the statistics. At its most granular level, Bundle displays where people are spending their money. My neighbors, for example, buy their electronics at Best Buy, Apple and Fry's.

.....

...the team also plans to allow users to enter their exact spending habits by either entering the data by hand or by giving users the option to upload credit card statements directly. This will make it even easier for users to compare their spending habits to those of their neighbors.

So what does a Facebook or a Google do? Google's strategy is mainly the former, hence their advance into more and more areas of your data trail. Clearly they cannot afford to leave Location to others, so we expect lost of location based operations across all their assets, and a lot of promotion of mobile smartphone systems which are the main method for picking up location data.

Facebook, Twitter etc clearly rapidly will need to accelerate a mobile application strategy will that drive Location based usage.

But the sweet spot will be Location Based gaming, one wonders what Google, Facebook et al will launch in this space.

With respect to financial data, its interesting that Google has already launched its own payment service (Checkout). I would not at all be surprised if Facebook starts to offer (or acquires) financial advice sharing capability in a far more structured way (there are people who offer this via Facebook already) especially as their user demographic ages.

Its a harder game to play as one needs some form of existing credibility, and there are regulatory issues to be skirted (the rise of non-bank banks - sorry, social loan services - online is very interesting here.

So (in) conclusion, I am hypothesizing that this location/gaming/financial data service based social network structure will be the next generation of Social Media. Messrs Schmidt and Zuckerberg have done a superb job of parting users from their privacy scruples, but Google and Facebook may not be the ones to profit.

There was an interesting post a few days back from on the Currencies of Social Media. I found it was interesting. The 5 currencies are:

1) Useful value (saving time etc) is more commonly referred to as brand utilities, so although Nike+ is held up as the ‘daddy’ of brand utilities, there are also a huge numbers of mobile apps that would qualify for this category.

2) Entertainment value (movies etc) is more commonly referred to as branded entertainment and it’s interesting to note that typically this is the approach that an ad campaign concept would take. The ultimate proof of social currency is when your content is being remixed and parodied, as happened with the Cadbury’s gorilla campaign.

3) Monetary value (aka real cash exchange value) is the social equivalent of the conventional sales promotion or PR activity. So it could be a simple voucher like the infamous Threshers’ discount voucher or a competition run in conjunction with an influential blogger.

4) Information value, (knowledge and thought leadership etc), can be produced in various formats e.g. video interviews, slideshare presentations and blog posts (like this one . More superficial forms of information, like gossip and conspiracy, can also be adopted.

5) Personal value (exclusivity, or drives fame/whuffie) is a particularly interesting currency, as it often provides social currency that is extremely compelling. The global success of reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, and the talent shows such as Pop Idol and X-Factor demonstrate the importance of fame.

Although it was done from the point of view of of a marketing person, the 5 definitions are useful to run with. But the really interesting question is this: what's the exchange rate between these currencies (or to put it another way, what is their relative value per user. One of these days I'll get around to publishing some of the client work we've done on Attention Economics, and the value of different Real Time data types. But for now this issue leads to a quick 2x2, as shown above. Here is a quick summary of the axes.

Direct Information Value: Of these types of currency above, some are backed up by more intrinsic value than others. Cash, or a promise to pay, is real. Social goods that can be put to use for productive value creation are more highly valued than those that merely alleviate boredom in slack time, for example.

Resource Constraint Value: The most valuable resource is the bottleneck resource - thats your time, you only have 24 hours a day of it, and it has varying levels of productivity and thus value. About 10 hours a day (sustainably) can be used for fairly high value work, most people need about 7 hours a day sleep (an average) which gives you about 7 hours a day of less valuable time. We tend to sue our high impact time to do Useful Stuff, our low value time for entertainment and personal maintenance.

This gives the 4 quadrants above:

Highest Value - high value information in constrained high value time. High quality content that solves the problems I have in my highest value activity time. This means not just good content, but presented in the right way that maximises utility and minimises resources consumed. Media example - FT data that helps me trade. "Information" and Monetary content (of high value) is mainly in this box

Value Bounded - Given I'm in my low value time, I will spend a lot of it to optimise the quality of information. "Personal" content, low value "Direct Money" and some "Entertainment" is in this box. Media example - this is why (for example) I won't pay for general news from a newspaper but will pay for FT content

User Bounded - This is the ability to get a piece of low value information just when/wher I need it. Location sensitive services at the right time are an example - this is when knowing good cocktail bars within 500m of where I am now is valuable. . Mainly "Useful" value, some "Entertainment" and some "Information" are here. Media example - a piece from the mainstream media that just happens to address what I want to do, now. (ie there is value in archive access)

Low Value - This s stuff that entertains me when I'm bored or in downtime. A lot of entertainment fits into this category, so its a high volume game. This consists mainly of "Entertainment" content and quiet a bit of low end "Personal Value" Media example - yet another Op-Ed on the topic du jour, videos to pass time while waiting for a train.

So as to relative exchange rates, I would argue that overall, on average:

Money > Information > Useful Value > Personal Value > Entertainment.

Thus the intrinsic value of a Social Media site lowers as it moves towards pure "entertainment" and thus it needs higher and higher volumes. I would go further, and hypothesize you may well pay (yes, subscribe) to gain access to the Highest Value sites, and even to get certain functionality/content in the bounded sites, but no one will pay for the lower value content. Incidentally, I suspect a similar thing occurs with regards to "social capital", eg Twitter "followers" vs people you influence, and what sort of people do influence others.

Mark Zuckerberg arguing that lack of privacy is the natural state of things - Read Write Web:

....in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"So now, a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and think: what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

This has allegedly been a change from the early Facebook ideology:

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

So - merely reflecting Social Change, or is Facebook making the change deliberately itself? Bear in mind that this form of lack of privacy is very beneficial to Facebook financially, as it makes the system a marketeers dream, so there is a certain sense of "he would say that wouldn't he". It is striking that just as Facebook is arguing more that "Privacy is Dead", just as we are seeing additional concern about privacy overall.

We've been following Facebook for 2 odd years now, and I think there are 3 points to make looking at their overall behaviour:

(i) Facebook was probably never that privacy friendly, just looking at its original T&C it clearly always had in mind the game of grabbing content to re-use as they see fit. In the early days they no doubt had to put on the sheeps clothes of being privacy friendly because hats what users wanted, but Beacon showed the wolf underneath.

(ii) Their behaviour from Beacon on has shown a steady progression in attempting to reduce privacy, despite continual user resistance. Its been a two steps forward, onse step back process.

(iii) Now that they have taken in large amounts of investor money at ridiculous valuations, the pressure is on to IPO - and thus to find a business model that justifies a ridiculous valuation. What better than a rationale that says 400m plus people's data has a "right to scrape" tag on it for all marketeers?

So here is a possible scenario - Facebook is driving for an IPO as its backers want payout before the inevitable emergence of the Next Great Social Network devalues it - they have seen the rules via Bebo and MySpace and Last.fm - and thus all hands are being put to the pumping of its prospective stock price. The aim is to drive to a peak of value before the (slower moving) dynamics of privacy worries catch up with them. The cry is "Apres moi les Deluge" - as with every pump comes the dump, but of course by then the people who have gone through the IPO have the brass in pocket.... leaving the new owners with the problem of a service which has created a reputation for abusing its user privacy at about the same time as "Next Gen" social nets start to emerge.

Update - this reminder from Howard Lindzon that (i) Facebook is not the first to attempt privacy scraping and (ii) follow the money:

The age of privacy did not end in 2004 with Facebook and the social web.

Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy and Facebook is a long overdue new competitor in a new age of what I would call ‘User Controlled Privacy’. If we are lazy, Facebook could be really big and powerful and we will be very aggravated with them.

Our spending habits are what is worth the most money. Our intentions are what is worth the money. It is why Mint.com could so quickly sell for $170 million and may have been really cheap. I long to see some real competition to Equifax, Capital One et al and Facebook and Twitter could take the lead in this. I would love to see a new system, but I don’t live in fantasyland and Equifax will not go quietly.

For now, Facebook can make a killing off gossip and dating leads. There are a few lost jobs from drunk tweets. But so far, they have 300 engineers, Russia owns them and I am worried that my phone bill could be $1 trillion from my daughter playing Farmville.

When Facebook has to deal with the government, the lobbyists and the lawyers at Equifax and Transunion, I may start to listen to Mark Zuckerberg.

The point about financial data being the real golden goose is important to keep in mind. Next step, Facebook buys Mint or somesuch?

Update - thoughtfully nuanced counter-argument by fellow Tuttler Joanne Jacobs.

Cory Doctorow has a piece rebutting "Social Media Deniers" in the Grauniad. Its good as far as it goes, here are the straw-man criticisms and rebuttals (expurgated version):

It's inconsequential – most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather

Yes, it certainly is. The reason for that is that most of it is "social grooming" – messages passed between friends and family members as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."


It is ugly – MySpace is a graphic designer's worst nightmare

The word you're looking for isn't "ugly", it's "vernacular". Graphic designers are paid to clearly communicate messages (both covert and overt) to strangers on behalf of clients. Kids who bling out their MySpace pages do so because they are exuberant and playful.


It is ephemeral – Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along

Totally correct, but this is a feature, not a bug. The technology that underpins social media is changing fast, and social media companies' bone-deep intuitions about what it should and shouldn't do are made obsolete every 18 months or so. Most of these companies won't be able to adapt. They will die, and be replaced by a new generation of social media companies who have better, more contemporary sensibilities.

But what disappointed me was that these are NOT what the smart observers are criticising Social Media for. And Cory knows it, as in his last paragraph he notes:

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.

They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet.

To which I'd add worrying evidence of Social Mob Rule. I just wish that Cory had spent as much time in the article looking at these far more serious flaws rather than the fairly trivial ones above. As a recent blog post by Bill Sledzik noted, there is a risk in Social media circles that the wish to be seen to be positive (or just join the hype) is impeding real analysis.

It’s easy to confuse critical thinking with negativity, and it happens way too much in social media circles. Those wont to criticize the dominant coalition of SM — or even the more popular personalities — risk being shouted down or even frozen out of discussions. It’s part of the “play nice” etiquette that can lead folks to embrace group-think.

I was reminded of social media’s coziness this past week by Mark Schaefer’s post likening the social web to high-school cliques.

The post is titled "Don’t let ‘positive thinking’ impede critical analysis". We need to keep that in mind

I was inspired by Deirdre Molloy's reading list for Social Media to list the books I've read to date that I have found most useful. As is the fashion, one has to have a number - well, I counted the ones that were very useful and that I'd recommend to get up and running fast - and there were 11

Firstly, Background Reading to get the evolution and big picture to where we are today:

1. The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage
A good analysis of the rise and eclipse of the telegraph, and the "online" social communities it formed. Many parallels with the Web, the 'Net and Social Media

2. Non Zero - Robert Wright
Examines how and why human society is learnin g to co-operate in larger and larger numbers, from small related groups of early cavemen to supra-nation emergence today. Its essentially a treatise in the evolution of behavioural psychology of co-operation.

Secondly, the theory of Social Networks:

3. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert Barabasi

An early - and still very good - primer for social network analysis - enough theory to get you going so you can tell why and how say Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are differently architected. There are later and more complex books, but this is a good starter.

4. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age- Duncan Watts
The first - and still one of the best - works on how the "Social Media" age will evolve. Its useful today as you can compare what was thought in 2004 to 2009 and see where reality has devolved.

Thirdly, how Social Media works

5. Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Even Shirky would probably now admit the book is a tad optimistic, or at least does not examine the dark side enough, but it is still an excellent summary of the whole space

6. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - Yochai Benkler
Hard going and aged in parts , but like Shirky a good coverage of the overall macroeconomic landscape of social networking. Also like Shirky, probably too optimistic (or politically naive, looking at how China censors Social Networks) but a good summary nonetheless

Fourthly, the critics and sceptics - the promoters tend to be on the optimistic side, but to get a balanced (realistic) view its necessary to pick up the views of informed critics:

7. The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It - Jonathan Zittrain
This is more about the struggle for control of the Internet, but the discussion has huge implications for social media services that sit on it, and touches on emerging issues like privacy abuse that tend to be glossed over elsewhere.

8. The Cult of the Amateur - Andrew Keen
The most vehement (and long standing) critic, who took the opposite side to Shirky et al. Lambasted frequently by many for his continual pessimism, he forms the counterweight. By 2009 it was clear that Social Media was in a middle ground between his views and Shirky et al.

Fourthly, the state of the art today. Sadly, (in my opinion) too much of the stuff that has come out in the last 2 years has been rushed out to satisfy a market demand (there are a plethora of new books essentially promising that you can make your fortune in Social Media - avoid!) rather than go into much depth to explain what's actually going on. Ones that I have been most impressed with are:

9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
I don't agree with everything they say (We've had more than a few shots at their thinking on Broadstuff) but being "proper" analysts their writing gives you a rational and structured view of their hypothesized ecosystem, so you can see how they come to their conclusions - and they are comprehensive and up to date.

10. The Blogosphere
The latest stuff is not in books yet, I have been watching a number of disciplines as they are being applied to online social networks - emerging topics such as Digital Anthroplogy, Social Graph Theory and Behavioural Economics, and research reports from a range of sources such as McKinsey, the Pew Institute, the EFF, and eMarketing for example. Techmeme is a useful source if you ignore the obvious product pimps from the digital megacorps, and The Economist is often an early-up with a business angle. Its also useful to look at whats being talked about at SXSW last year and next - not so much by the well known names in the main panels, but the emergent topics in the group sessions.

And lastly, the emergent future - there are futurists, there are science fiction writers, and there is Cory Doctorow who is both a commentator on the Social Media scene and a Sci Fi Author, so the primer is:

11. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
An analysis of Social Capital (which he calls Whuffie) which is partly story, partly science fiction prediction, and partly satire. He has a large body (of work ) and its a useful starting point.

Now you will all feel that I have left some books out, and how dare I include say Andrew Keen but - in my view anyway - these are the ones that are original contributions, and still largely on target and allow one to get an overall picture to separate sincerity from snake oil (becasuse there is a lot of that around - in fact familiarity with the Gartner Hype Curve is essential in this space). Anyway, feel free to criticise, commend or create your own list.

A fascinating study by B L Ochman shows that:

In May 09 when we first used Tweepsearch to count of the Twitter bios of self-proclaimed social media gurus, experts, superstars and ninjas there were 4,487. A mere seven months later, we were shocked to see that there are now nearly 16.000. They are multiplying like rabbits.

She goes on to break out the 15,740 they found in the chart above.

This represents a 3.5x increase every 6 months. Projecting this growth forward means that there will be nearly 30m Social Media Experts etc on Twitter by this time in 2012, to add to the other disasters in that year (and 100m by mid 2013).

Assuming that Twitter's current growth rate of c 0% on 60m users stays the same in the next 3 years, and that current users churn (ie drop out or become inactive) at a modest 25% per annum, that allows us to calculate that by Xmas 2012 about 50% of all Twitter users will be Social media Experts and by mid 2013 about 80% of them will be. By end 2013 there will be 375m Twitter users, of which 360m will be Social Media Experts of one stripe or another.

Of course, this is assuming current growth rates and these may change over time

Speaking personally, I think anyone who was not on Twitter by end of 2007 has no place in calling themselves a Social Media Guru/Expert/Whatever......

Update - Poor Adam Tinworth retweeted this post and got lambasted for it on Twitter - anyway, he has written the more serious analysis of the issue B L Ochman and I were satirising over here, ie the profusion of charlatans in the field.

As you all know, Facebook changed its privacy settings "for your benefit". As we noted earlier, this is bollocks, its all about getting their mitts on your data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the best analysis of this so, being a lazy blog, we precis its analysis:

The Good: Simpler Privacy Settings and Per-Post Privacy Options

The new changes have definitely simplified Facebook's privacy settings, reducing the overall number of settings while making them clearer and easier for users to find and understand. The simplification of Facebook's privacy settings includes the elimination of regional networks, which sometimes would lead people to unwittingly share their Facebook profile with an entire city, or, as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent open letter, an entire country.

.....

The Bad: EFF Doesn't Recommend Facebook's "Recommended" Privacy Settings

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends" on Facebook

......

The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

In other words, the word "Privacy" has been redefined by Facebook (and, it must be said some other Web 2.0 darlings) to mean "rampant extraction of your private data for general exposure and datamining". This is an inevitable result of the failure of the Advertising business model to fund te social networks, as we pointed out in our paper "FreeConomics - Why your data is free but everywhere in chains"

If you add this to the Facebook Terms and Conditions (Facebook has the right to use your content for itself in any way into perpetuity) then its very clear that if you use the system for much more than the most banal of things, and expect your privacy to be kept intact, you are an A List sucker. But then, they already have 350m of them and, as others have noted beforehand, new ones are born every minute.

It will be interesting to see how this plays to the EU Data Protection regulations. While the regulations are a bit fuzzy, this definitely flies in the face of the intent

(Update - its Monday 14th, 5 days later and the whole shebang has finally hit the fan, this one is typical)

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has published an Open Letter about changes in policy to make Facebook a more lovely, open and otherwise happy smiling place - by actually increasing privacy. Zuckerberg:

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.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Thats very interesting. Regional networks - in theory - are part of the whole "GeoLocation" current craze which is going to be one of The Next Things. Also, further limiting who sees what flies against their recent drive to open it up amd Twitterize it, which again is one of the Hot New Things.

Now there is a bit of stuff afterwards where they will be "recommending new privacy settings based on your needs" which may be a euphemism for "prizing open your data for the bots", but assuming its on the level, why turn one's back on the New New Ways?

Seems to me there are two very plausible reasons:

(i) There is not enough money in the current ecosystem to make it worth opening the data up (aka the Murdoch Realisatiion - Google makes money, but do you?) compared to the potential PR risks of being seen as a privacy thief.

(ii) The Facebook model is to make money out of datamining its user data and giving advertisers access to this - why share the love? Given that they have 350m users and growing, thats a huge private ecosystem

In other words, its a rational execution of the existing walled garden strategy - make it more of a paradise internally to recruit/retain people, but why open it up to others? It also sends a signal to where they believe value will lie in the "let it all hang out" debate - possibly because of their size - but I suspect they're right - most people want privacy, its only a noisy minority who like to let it all out, all over.