Can Facebook Become THE Uber App? Yes.

I know, I know. Yet another take on Facebook, and this from a slightly long-in-the-tooth, techno Johnny-come-lately. But hear me out, because as a new-comer to the community and one who is clearly NOT representative of its core demographic, I see a way that it could bridge the gap among friends, family and professional relationships while preserving privacy and access on an as-desired basis. And this, from my perspective, could make Facebook THE killer app for all forms of social network management:

Provide the ability to create three sub-profiles, personal, family and work, the contents of which are tagged and stored in a master profile but which are only displayed pursuant to their tags. Provide full integration with LinkedIn with a revenue sharing model, and we'd see LinkedIn use skyrocket by bringing Facebook users into the fold while Facebook could tap into the attractive mature professional demographic that would deepen its data and add valuable, high CPC eyeballs to its user base. Finally, add full email integration in order to open up the messaging layer and facilitate integration with legacy email accounts.

It seems to me that the principal value of Facebook to its users, as with most online applications, is data. My accumulated data. The data I may have taken years to build. Pictures, contacts, notes, groups, etc. Just as with a gamer who has built an identity in WoW and acquired powers and stuff, the legacy one has painstakingly constructed has immense value. The difference, however, is that while a gamer's identity is fungible, i.e., you can sell your identity, tools, powers, etc. in the market, one's personal identity is not.  This is why Facebook and apps like it, say LinkedIn, where enormous personal investment happens over long periods of time, create stickiness and have the potential for annuitized revenue like none other. And as one moves from crazy college co-ed to buttoned-down professional, it is hard to stomach (if not completely unacceptable) tossing out one's Facebook identity simply because of some youthful escapades that might not look too good when scrutinized as part of a background check. But this is a harsh reality. HR departments can and do go to Facebook to check out stuff on new hires; the cat is out of the bag on that one.

But while Facebook in college and shortly thereafter is a great way to remain connected to friends and keep them apprised of your goings on, it can quickly become a powerful business networking tool as one moves into the workforce and enters the next phase of life. But what about the problem of those embarrassing pictures from that tequila-fueled toga fest from when you were 19 years old on your profile? How about tagging all that stuff "Personal," and only permitting certain types of friends to access this profile? Wouldn't that be great? For me this isn't an issue, since I was already a (relatively) mature guy by the time I got on Facebook (one month ago), and I don't have any such pictures on my profile (fortunately digital photography was a glimmer in someone's eye when I was in undergrad), but for those, say, two decades younger than me this is a real and serious issue. And what about family? Some may not want their moms, dads and Aunt Hildas checking out such Facebook content (should Aunt Hilda be surfing the web and digging for dirt). In fact, one may want a more sanitized version of their Personal profile to be available for viewing by Family members. This would seem to make sense as well.

And then there's work. I use LinkedIn. I use Facebook. I personally want one app, one place where I can manage my social networks. LinkedIn is a great tool, but its social networking functionality, look and feel pretty much stink. Facebook provides a far richer, deeper, more dynamic and meaningful experience, one that I find very valuable in my professional life. Let's get them together. Let me import my LinkedIn contacts into Facebook, into a profile called Professional. I don't want to start building up a contacts database de novo by using one of the available Facebook apps - I want all my LinkedIn information incorporated into my Facebook profile. Now. These are two great companies with two great user bases that, over time, should meld into one. Let's get the ball rolling. Today's high schoolers will be in the work force in five years. Today's college students less than that. These are the future Professional users. Let's lay the foundation for them to build and manage three sub-profiles by implementing a tagging layer to separate one's spheres - Personal, Family and Professional. To me it makes all the sense in the world. Now I just need for Mark Zuckerberg to hear my call.

I'm sure I'm the 7,453th person to come up with these ideas. I just haven't read them. But I do think they make common sense and would cement Facebook's primacy as THE social networking platform. But they gotta open it up, adopt a more comprehensive view of one's life and social networks and facilitate the tagging of data to create these sub-profiles. I've got to believe that legacy Facebook users would love the comfort of knowing that they could safely add to their profiles without risking their jobs or freaking out their families. And isn't this what identity management is all about?

Comments

[Michael]

I've got lots to say about this, but for now, "People are killing off their profiles in a mass Facebook suicide" :

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/09/facebook_suicid.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_nussbaumondesign

[Ben Werdmuller]

While Facebook's functionality is undoubtedly great, I think this misses an opportunity to allow for a much wider spectrum of applications and social networking possibilities. In particular this is because the entire platform would be controlled by one company, and depend on its approval.

What if you could have distribtued social networking? You'd have a single, Facebook-like interface, but the applications and data would be spread across the Internet, much as the web is now. You could add friends and communicate with tools no matter where they were hosted. Net result: no single point of failure, no monopoly, and a much larger business ecosystem surrounding the platform.

The Data Sharing Summit was a recent meeting of Silicon Valley social networking service providers, to try and begin to establish exactly this. We're aiming to do our part with Elgg (which allows you to run your own social network) and Explode, and are actively participating in the discussions surrounding open social networking standards. The benefits, we think, are clear.

Meanwhile, Elgg also supports the granular access controls you're talking about, even when mixed with the distributed OpenID standard. It's being used in organisations and intranets, where data is more sensitive - conversely, it's not actually in Facebook's interests to let you hide things from your friends.

[Ken Yeadon]

Almost but not quite, IMHO.

Facebook is still a proprietary environment. What is needed is a meta-network, where the data exists outside the framework itself rather than inside it. People will want to participate in multiple niche social networks defined around specific contexts, but allow the data to be pooled amongst them. People also want to partition and control their data identity, to separate their personal life and their professional lives for example, and to choose how to link them and who can see those associations. This isnt best done in single defined environment, but rather through loosely coupled platforms using common standards, and in particular it lends itself to a distributed, open source approach, precisely because people dont want any single party to own the data, but rather for the data to be dispersed and the connections under their own control.

Sound like a pipe-dream? I dont think so! Take a look at ELGG, an open source framework for building social networks. Its use has hitherto been centred on the academic community, but we have used it to build a niche social network centred on a sport (Rugby)and it works very well! Now add to this the ability to harvest data from multiple networks and choose how your identity on each is linked by the ability to manage your "alter-egos" (www.ex.plode.us), all within the paradigm of a trust-based single sign on model (open-ID), and now you are talking. A meta network that isnt owned by anyone except the user, effectively a virtualised operating system for managing your data identity on the internet, with all the permissioning, access control and connections able to be managed by you!

I think what Facebook represents is a proof-of-concept for a social network, not the end-game itself. In the same way that "noone owns the internet", no one can own the social net if it is to realise its full potential. I dont think we have even started to appreciate the power of this as a communication paradigm, and any durable solution needs to be capable of evolving with its user community rather than defined by the interests of a single commercial sponsor. That doesn't mean Facebook is out of it by any means- it very capably addresses the "generic" aspects of a horizontal network, but it isn't sufficiently open or flexible to accommodate every possible permutation of use, and conferring such power on any one party has potentially alarming consequences.

[Allan]

Almost, but not quite-- the way to get this done is not to have 3 monolithic categories (although that could be good for a pre-populated list), but a user-expandable list of category tags that can be applied to any friend. So for instance, I can tag all of my flag football friends on facebook with "Flag07-08" and then tag content based on this-- boom, they are allowed to see the appropriate tagged content, but not content that does not correspond to the tags.

[Tim]

Great ideas. Recent grads don't want to turn their profiles into a boring, sterile resume, that old friends can't connect/reminisce about and professionals who take their work seriously need to keep that retainer in the work/life balance intact. Maybe you should "poke" Zuckerberg via facebook to get his attention...on second thought, probably not.

[Jon]

Maybe cf. Vox? (www.vox.com)