Last month I wrote a post on why Facebook should open up, and mentioned some of the subsequent benefits of doing so. Well, last week Facebook made everything published from your “What’s on your mind?” box available to view by everyone (including robots*), unless otherwise specified in your privacy settings.
How many people do we really know on our list?
When I first started out using Facebook, the only friend I had on there were those that I had personally met (which is really how Facebook started out). Now I probably get a friend request at least once a day from someone I’ve never met, or hardly know, most frequently involving business with the occasional friend of the fiance doing a bit of Facebook stalking to find out what the soon to be husband is all about.
I am sure we are all seeing that friend lists are beginning to become more and more bloated and they’ll only continue to as Facebook continues to see mainstream success with some 200 million users. This worsens as business leaders continue to adopt Facebook and as it grows as a networking tool (which is too bad, because I think LinkedIn is so much better designed for that). List saturation is inevitable.
Speaking of businesses, a recent survey shows that 60% of employers search the web when considering potential employees. At first that may not matter to you, but when they send you a friend request on Facebook, suddenly it becomes a lot more real. Do you friend someone who is potentially your new boss, or do you reject their request? I bet a quick way to lose a potential job is to reject their friend request.
The world is already getting to know about us organically.
The more these 6 degrees of separation type friends and acquaintances begin to saturate our friend lists, the less it begins to matter that Facebook is making our information available to everyone – because it’s already happening organically. The organic growth of our online presence should be of no surprise since the web is constantly moving toward a more open platform (both naturally and due to giants like Google giving it a swift kick in the pants). Our choices then becomes embrace it, or start learning to use Facebook’s advanced privacy settings.
robots*: What is being referred to as “robots” above, and in the readwriteweb article as a “robot”, is actual programmable code that will be able to view and store all of that status information on Facebook. This allows companies to then use our data for products or applications. Note twitter’s application success for why this is good.