Losing Their Cool: The Downside of Expanding Hot Social Networking Sites

News/Social Network/Webculture/Facebook
Found on: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Facebook, a social networking site known as an online meeting place for college and high school students, is opening its doors to more people in an effort to grow beyond its current nine million registered users. The problem: The move could be risky if it blurs the company's focus and dilutes its brand.

Social networking sites often connect people within certain demographic groups -- such as students, business people, independent music fans or twenty-something urbanites -- using tools such as chat, uploaded pictures from users and online diaries.

For Facebook, the move to expand comes amid backlash over two features the site added September 5, 2006, dubbed "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed," which allowed users to track information updates of others in their social circles. When a person's profile changed, updates would be broadcast to people who subscribed to the feed. These updates could include such personal information as a subscriber's decision to break off a romantic relationship or start a new one. Although the same information was available for viewing in a person's profile, some users objected to the lack of control over the distribution of their personal information. On September 8, Facebook issued a mea culpa in response to these privacy concerns, and now Facebook's new features have more finely tuned privacy controls. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in Facebook's corporate blog: "We really messed this one up."