Facebook Opens to everyone. Good. Not a surpise.
Facebook is expected to soon announce that everyone will be able to sign up for facebook. Zuck’s first (and second and third) company priority is Growth, because along with stickiness (how often and how much an average user is on the site, a metric where facebook rules), growth decides which social network will be relevant.
Facebook can’t grow fast enough since it has saturated it’s eligible, core demographic. This plan has been in the works for over a year, with the questions revolving around how to track fraud and group people meaningfully.
The uninformed will holler again about privacy, but they should go complain instead to myspace, which as noted in my book, opens up all user information to just about everyone. Facebook will likely not change how college networks work. It may allow unvalidated friends to accept invitations, but would almost certainly track the referral/registration history, to be able to prune away bad branches of the invitation tree.
As a closed network, Facebook has gained success by modeling real life networks, towards which multiply.com is also narrowing its focus. Real life networks have a large geographic component, and they naturally include friends outside of school or work associations. However, I also have many people here in my geography who are not my friends, and who I don’t want to share in my information. As the book describes in detail, people closeness categories or some other meaningful way of sorting my “real friends” away from everyone in artificially bloated networks is increasingly necessary. I do not know that Facebook has a planned solution for this problem.
Stutzman notes “for Facebook users, the symbolic nature of the change from exclusive to non-exclusive could be viewed as strongly negative. […] With the new Facebook, there is no longer a notion of exclusivity - Facebook is just another SNS, albeit with a exclusive model that can now be mass-appropriated by competitors.”
Forbes coverage notes that Facebook does not benefit from comparisons with Myspace, and given networks effect and the large fraction of Facebook users who are on both sites, could be severely hurt by losing it’s exclusive, safe, tight, community feel.
