Facebook’s Asks Members about New Admission Policy

Two Days Ago: “Social network Facebook plans to completely ditch its admissions policy, welcoming anyone with internet access. The major change was scheduled for today, but has now been postponed until next week while the company struggles to regroup from last week’s member revolt in response to new activity-tracking features.”

Today: When the News Feed and Mini-Feed launched last week, the Facebook community revolted. Complaining of privacy issues, Facebook members formed anti-feed groups and sent letters to the company requesting the feeds either be taken down or at least made optional. Facebook chose the ‘optional’ suggestion.

Signing into Facebook this morning, I was greeted with a news message from Facebook. In the past few days, word got out about Facebook opening up to the public, and students and alumni alike revolted again – the fear being Facebook would become just another terrible Myspace social-networking site.

So, learning from the recent news-feed debacle, Facebook decided to ask before it made any changes.

Before We Expand

I want to clear up some rumors and ask for your feedback.

Right now a lot of people want their friends to use Facebook, but they can’t get on. Soon, we’re planning on letting these people register for regional networks.

I know a lot of you are worried about this and how it changes the site. Honestly, it shouldn’t change much for you. College networks will remain exclusive to people from those colleges. High school and work networks will remain exclusive as well. Only your friends and other people in your networks can see your profile. This is what makes Facebook different, and we’re not changing it.

From reading a lot of your messages, it seems like some of you want more separation. Do you want to be completely invisible to people who aren’t in a college or high school? Do you want to make sure they can’t message or poke you? We like hearing from you. Please send us your thoughts on how we can make this work for you.

And just to clear some other things up: we’re not putting up more banner ads, we’re not charging anyone, we’re not letting people put random HTML in their profiles, and we’re not selling your information. Facebook is about increasing information flow and connecting people, not these things.

Please send us your thoughts here.

I for one appreciate this openness. They’re saying, “hey – we’re still going along with our plans to open it up, but how can we retain (or more accurately simulate) what makes Facebook special and exclusive?

My school was one of the first non-Ivy league schools to be on the Facebook, so I’ve learned to get over the loss of exclusivity. You think people were upset when they added a High School Facebook? We were just as upset when they were letting local universities join (well, maybe not as upset as long as some of our friends went there). Adding ‘Regions’ just made sense after a while, considering how many users had graduated.

And now for my editorial: I think there should be a right of passage to be on Facebook. Sure you can’t customize a Facebook page to look as awful as a Myspace page, but there are ways to ruin it just the same. Registering from college was a fairly good safeguard against the 14-year-old girl contingent. When high school was added it was perceived that it was just in preparation for graduating to the real college Facebook when the time came.

I propose that Facebook come up with a solution to ensure the quality of new members, perhaps through some sort of invitation process (flawed, I know – but that’s the best I have at this moment). Profiles should default to the most extreme privacy settings instead of the open settings they default to currently. Also, the privacy settings need a good visualization, like an AJAX illustration, so that the amount of text isn’t overwhelming.

Something also needs to happen socio-culturally to indicate that you don’t have to be Facebook friends with everybody you’ve ever met. There are some people we just don’t want to be friends with on Facebook and that needs to be deemed acceptable. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle and maybe the one that scares people the most. We’ve reached a point in our society when those of us using the Internet to maintan, form, and develop our relationships are suddenly bound by the structural determinism of the technology. If I don’t accept your add request on Myspace or I don’t have you in my “Top 8″ does that mean we’re not friends? Not necessarily. Before the Internet, we hadn’t really ever been forced to write down our friends’ names in a list for others to see. Sure, there were other ways we showed who we were friends with, but not on a scale as large or immediate as our current situation.

It’s a huge hurdle, I know, and it’s not a goal Matt Zuckerberg and his hardworking programmers and developers should be charged with. But technology is changing so rapidly that we haven’t had time to cope with our current state much less prepare for the cultural changes ahead.

My final suggestion to Facebook is to please hold off for a little bit. You shouldn’t worry about competing with Myspace because you’re in different markets. Cultivate your current community before you do anything else. Give it some time before you open up to the general public and do some market-testing and cultural R&D before you make the next big step. Thanks.

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Apple wants more iPod ready cars

“Bob Borchers, who is the senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, told CNET that Apple is interested in making the use of iPods in cars much easier.”

Who would have thought that MP3 players in cars would take so long to get off the ground? The lawyers, that’s who. As a generalization, before the iPod showed up the term “MP3″ had negative connotations. MP3 was associated with illegal file-sharing, not with audio compression for the mass-market. With the advent of iTunes, the mass-market had a way to get a wide variety of legal MP3s easily online. Apple again helped break down the tenuous relationship of online music and legality. Perhaps, then, they should be the ones to really pursue the automobile market for MP3 audio.

I say this because my first instinct was to chide Apple for shutting the competition out of the car audio market. But it’s a much harder market to get into than one would expect, as illustrated in Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture.

“Your investment [in MP3 audio] buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:

“I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car’s built-in sound system, but that the company’s marketing and legal departments weren’t comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. …” [5]

This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life” offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation.”

So maybe a big company like Apple is doing a long-term favor to all of the non-disc based audio innovators. Though Lessig wrote this in 2004, the state of the market has not evolved much. We’ve seen a few manufacturers who have taken legal risks by getting involved. Audio-jacks and FM transmitters are currently the most common way to listen to MP3s in the car. The 2007 Infiniti G35 will come with a hard drive to store audio files on but it is the rare exception to the rule.

If Apple can get its foot in the door with a few car manufacturers, the gates might open for others to claim, “our car is ready for all of your audio devices.” It seems risky, but if anybody has the pull right now it’s Apple. We’ll see.

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