Places

Facebook has been around a few years now, and has grown to be the undisputed king of social networks. However, with that they draw a lot of fire – particularly around their decidedly odd decisions around privacy, and their reactions to anyone who questions these decisions.

You like it because they tell you to. Or because it's BEWBS

Any new features they release are “opt-out” features, rather then features you can go and turn on later. Something that is much to the chagrin of a large, vocal group of users of the site. I would imagine the growth of Facebook is not because people love it, but more that everyone is on it, and it is still the best we have in terms of social networking. However, most would admit if anything better came along, a mass exodus would occur.

Other then being a medium in which social media guru’s can preach good-PR doctrine to their disciples, Facebook is a means in which most users (presumably) connect and chat with friends and family distant enough/not convenient enough to talk to face-to-face. It’s also a means to keep friends and family updated on activities you’re up to, or to share things you’re interested in. All rather innocent and innocuous activities in themselves. However Facebook manages to make sharing your weekend trip away’s photos seedy by culling them to use in publicly viewed ads, or to allow a 6-degrees of separation rule to who gets to see photos. If I’m tagged in a photo of someone else, anyone connected to me (but not the person who uploaded the original photo) can look through this strangers photo catalogue.

One big part of social media that has exploded in 2010 is the ability to ‘tag’ your location. This is thanks to the proliferation of GPS-enabled phones that so many people have. Gowalla and FourSquare are the big names in this field. Gowalla is a nice, well designed implementation but FourSquare wins because it’s userbase is far more active, while Gowalla’s is more passive. 4sq turns its service into a social game, where check-ins give you points. The more times you check into a place, the better your chance of being the locations “mayor”, thus brandishing a slightly larger e-penis to all who follow you. Some companies (namely Starbucks) give offers and deals to mayors of their stores, and companies can create special offers to people who check-in with some caveat (check in on your birthday and get a free pint, etc.).

This has been huge, and largely fed off the spiraling community around Twitter. Twitter itself is not interested in implementing its own system. Facebook, though, derives its revenue from an ad-based model, which needs to keep up with these systems in order to stay relevant and earn cashola. No problem there. So begins a new system (still being rolled out) called Places. It’s the same idea as FourSquare or Gowalla, or the countless other clones (SCVNGR, etc.) but embedded into the Facebook experience.

4places

I can’t tell you if it’s lovely or not because I can’t use it, as a dirty European. But I can say what Facebook is doing with it is a little… odd. Users can tag anyone they want in a status update, to make it relevant to their friends/family. No worries there, in fact it’s a great idea which gives some status updates more context by giving a link to another user being referenced. However, Places also lets you tag users. Even if they’re not there. So, if you’re my friend, I can tag you as being in a brothel, causing a bit of trouble if all of your friends read your status updates seeing what seedy underground S&M clubs you attend regularly.

Furthermore, like so much of Facebook, this is an “opt-out” system, so everyone is involved. Yep, even the younger users of Facebook. So you can tag a 13 year old as being in the cinema, getting him into trouble with his mum when he should have been in school. There are so many ways to exploit this system, it’s amazing it wasn’t obvious to the engineers that this should be an “opt-in” service that works more like FourSquare then Facebook. I say engineers, but the chances are these odd decisions are coming from the top. Undoubtedly the Facebook engineers are quite talented individuals (hire me!).

It’s a shame, because I want to like Facebook. I really do. I use it more then any social network of its kind (excluding twitter) but their series of miss-steps are going to kill it when someone does it better. Someone, like Google (hire me!) perhaps? Alex Albrecht off Diggnation gave the perfect quote about this system – “it’s like they implemented it out of their best interests, not mine.” It rings true across the board. A lot of decisions from Facebook lately appear to be self-centered and driven by potential revenue. Not user experience. And it’s a shame, because clearly engineers are thinking of this stuff, but the top brass just don’t ‘get it’. And they keep growing, so they think they’re doing a stellar job, perhaps not knowing that a sleeping giant is waiting to sucker-punch them. The sleeping giant is likely to come from Google, or even Apple (who are building a $1billion data center in the US… that kind of money doesn’t get spent on email systems or music storage).

We’ll see what happens when it properly rolls out, but they won’t change their stance on settings (of which there are far too many these days) and opting in/out, but being able to corrupt other user check-ins is a low blow to their community, even for the company who so blatantly use their users’ information for advertising or search indexing.