Facebook Watch

Facebook was first a service for Harvard students. It then expanded to include other universities and colleges. Next it started taking in high school students. And now, incredibly right on the heels of the News Feed controversy, it intends to open its doors to the public at large.

This isn’t really all that surprising. It used to be that a Facebook user was only affiliated with people in his or her college’s “network.” But when Facebook made the addition several months ago of being able to affiliate yourself with employer and geographical networks as well, it started to give away Facebook’s ambition at becoming the next big social networking site.

While its membership may be less than a tenth of Myspace’s, Facebook’s corporate backing (eg. Microsoft) puts it in a strong place to contend with the News Corp owned site. Many people prefer Facebook, however, for its sense of exclusivity and privacy (at least to the extent that it takes more than a trip to www.facebook.com/yourname for your mom to see photos of you hitting a beer bong, as it is with Myspace). While Facebook will still restrict certain information based on geographic affiliation, this latest move seems prove Facebook’s status as one fish in the ever-expanding pool of Friendster clones.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:58 pm and is filed under corporate, myspace, friendster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.