It was started by Harvard sophomores in February 2004. Now, a year later the infectiously popular website Facebook has come to Leeds. Created as a way for members of different residential houses to keep in touch during the digital era the Facebook website interlinks users in a way no normal yearbook cood. With a copy dead-trees yearbook, you can’t search, you can’t update and you can’t ‘Poke’ people to say a quick ‘hi!’ as you can on the facebook website. It turns out, this ease of use and interlinking of friends, quickly creating large but not infinite social networks, is exactly what people have been waiting for.
Linking everyone in Harvard together suddenly became very successful, with 6000 students signing up in the first three weeks spurring the students who created the site to progressively open it up for other schools. Now the site is reported to be the 9th most visited site on the internet and 3/4 of the five million US college students who make up the majority of users log on at least once over 24 hours. Alexa ranks theFacebook at 35th most visited English language site, behind MySpace (5), Orkut (34) and near Hi5 (37). From November 2004 to November 2005 Nielsen/NetRatings showed Facebook increasing in traffic by 530%. Its speedy popularity is clear: on Sunday 19th of March, over 9,500 photos were uploaded to the profiles of Leeds students according to Facebook’s ‘Pulse’ trendtracker. What makes Facebook unique is that to become a member you have to have a college based email address so in the US that’s .edu or in the UK it’s .ac.uk. By limiting the numbers (and kinds) of people who’re on the site there is an automatic limit to how many unknowns can see your information. If you find a friend on the site, before you see their information you have to be added as a Friend. It doesn’t let you add just anyone and instantly have access to their information; you have to get permission from the other person by that agreeing that you are in fact a friend.
While others like MySpace, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International thrive on the thrill of opening your information up to potentially millions of people, Facebook thrives on the community. It lists information on parties thrown by members of your college. You get groups of people who have a common interest like clubs and societies, halls of residence and course modules enrolled in. Some of these you have to sign up for, others are automatically created by the information you provide. You can be linked to everyone from your hometown, highschool, first year location, major or just film-interests.
This interlinking of contacts could be annoying (do you really want all the people you’ve left behind from secondary or highschool to be able to get in touch?) but it can be refreshing. Because there is the ability for so many people who you know to see your information and pictures, there’s a sense of self-censorship. People don’t post pornographic or especially rude images on their profiles or photo albums. Why? Because your whole university will see it, know who you are, and distain you as a result. There is another issue of personal information. I at first struggled with what information to post online because, as a member of several different and often conflicting groups, causing conflict and trouble for myself isn’t a goal in social-networking. As a member of a military training group, do I post information about my boyfriend, a potentially agitating disclosure? But the question boils down to whether you care about the people who could potentially add you as a Friend on your individual lists.
The answer comes from thinking about who those people think that you are, and if you’re not that person, why do you want them to be your friend. If they’re a friend of yours, then in a way you have a duty to be honest with them, and so if you’re not interested in those games you always used to play, if secretly you’re a math geek and you’ve now achied far more than your school bullies who taunted you for your skills, why hide it? Some things users may find virtue in not displaying. Following a recent series of articles about the dangers of Facebook publicity, some users are becoming wary of what to post on their profiles. With the ability for alumni registrations, potential employers can log onto the website and look up the information of an applicant from their alma mater. When you have photographs of yourself inebriated, in scanty clothing or (in the US at least) under-age drinking, the consequences become more notable. The message: don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t want everyone else you might ever meet, to see. It may sound Orwellian, but because you are so clearly identified on the Facebook website everything you post can be forever linked back to you.
Many of us innocently put up photographs, funny quotes and stories, and assume that there is not someone pouring over our weekend escapades in search of bad behavior. Apparently, this is not the case.
-Chris Berger, Facing Facebook: The Daily Princetonian
As the many media articles on Facebook have discussed, there’s a degree of popularity contest in the database of users. How many friends do you have? Who do you know and from where? The numbers of connections in your university life are laid bare. There’s little value in quality, but when you look at the lists of some people it is the quantity that hits you. In retrospect, you know those friends from Elementary School - do you feel as cool? Do you?
At the same time as being a fake and superficial exercise in the vein of MySpace and Friendster, while the number-popular look busy and those who care not don’t show up at all, Facebook has an impact. It allows fellow students to get in touch with an ease that’s unmatched in the real world. My department has a social society that last year died a form of death by apathy. This was apt since the death of the Politics Society comes at a time of declarations about voter apathy. Anyway, in a meeting on Tuesday of last week I was asked by the Secretary about what we could do to revive the group. Was it just because people don’t need a social society? Apparently this isn’t the feeling because there are many politics students who have few friends within their own course. Perhaps we can point a finger of blame and say they’ve been lax in not nurturing relationships, but there’s been little done to help these people. A Facebook Politics Society group was created on Sunday night and by the Tuesday evening we were able to report 168 members. This with absolutely no publicity, no promotion or official sponsorship. When there is a need, groups like Facebook can come and bridge the divide because in the end nobody wants to lose contact with friends, and if that contact network comes with added benefits and tools, there’s a great chance it’ll thrive.
Wired News: College Facebook Mugs Go Online
The Associated Press: Finding Friends with Facebook
LA Times & Xeni Jardin: Pouty-mouth poses for narcoleptic dudes
Cake Party misleads Campus Police: ‘Ummm…so I’m in the New York Times’
Ars Technica: Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble
[Princeton’s Department for Public Saftey] issues guidelines on [officials’ use of] Facebook
Guardian: Social networking site helps college students around the world make a connection
Odeo.com: DORM’d Interview: Chris Hughes of Facebook.com
I’ll tell you all tomorrow.
