I fully agree with Fred - it is the violation of the cultural norms (what I've been calling the contextual norms of information flow) within Facebook that makes this problematic. On Sep 7, 2006, at 1:32 PM, Fred Stutzman wrote:
I've written some on the topic, concentrating on how these moves broke the cultural norms of the environment.
# Facebook's shaky standpoint. Facebook takes the stand that feeds introduce nothing "new". Unfortunately, this logic fails because information disclosure is both quantitative and qualitative. Facebook (sort of) gets to claim there is quantitatively no more information being shared (more on this later). Qualitatively, the difference is huge. Information disclosure is multidimensional. Each day, when you put on your clothes, you have assumptions that a certain audience will see you in these clothes. Imagine if every day when you got dressed, everyone saw what you were wearing - wouldn't you agree that is vastly different? And wouldn't it make you feel a little weird? Now multiply this by every information facet shared in the Facebook. Perhaps now the problem makes more sense.
# On the nature of friendship in the Facebook. My research has shown that facebook users average hundreds of friends. This means that the nature of friendship is different and culturally unique in the Facebook. Friendship in the Facebook is cultural currency - I link to you and you link to me. Implicit in this is a one-time exchange of social capital, nothing more. However, friendship is an absolutely core element of the service - and with this change, the nature of friendship in the service, and everything that goes along with it, changes. From now on, when you friend someone, you're agreeing to let them have a feed of everything you do - this is a huge difference from the previous notion of friendship, which users were quite comfortable with.
# On how users explore each other. The common argument for feeds is that "the information is out there anyway." So it stands, if you wanted to, you could replicate the functionality of feeds by checking your friend's profiles every day. This argument fails because this is not how Facebook users use the service. Facebook users log in to check their messages, respond to pokes, use profiles as "white pages", coordinate events - they aren't logging in to surf profiles endlessly (sure, they do this when they have an exam the next day, but it isn't the normal activity). Why is this? Well, put simply, you know your friends. And the people you've friended that aren't really your friends - sure, you'll check them out from time to time, but that's not how the site is used. In essence, profiles are just a small part of the site.
Users understand this. When they update their profile, they are updating it for a micro-audience of a subset of their friends. They aren't expecting everyone they know to see (or care) about every last minute change in their life. People have a mental model of disclosure, and this change breaks that mental model. Even though "nothing is different", it is clear that something absolutely is different. The privacy of being average is gone.
If interested, more at: http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-facebook-broke-its- culture.html
Regards, Fred
On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Nicole Ellison wrote:
Hi Nancy, I'm not sure this qualifies as "more thought out" but I think you've on to something. Yesterday my colleague Cliff Lampe and I spoke with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115759058710755893.html? mod=technology_main _promo_left) and this was a slant to the story they wrote: the fact that facebook users were upset not only about the feature itself, but also the fact that it seemed to be implemented without any feedback from users. Which seems to be the case, as this quote from the article suggests: "Ms. Deitch said Facebook's feedback from users comes in the form of emails to its customer-service email address, which the company's product-development team reviews weekly. But the company typically doesn't solicit feedback by showing features to users before launching them." Because these social network sites are built on user-supplied content, users feel more ownership over the site as a whole (compared to, say, a news portal or e-commerce site). It may be that the reaction to this change might prompt deeper, better user research on the part of these sites (which I agree is needed). Following up on the earlier conversation: My sense from speaking with students is that they dislike the feature not because it is pulling already available information, but because it is displaying profile changes that otherwise would be hard to identify. If I have 150 friends on the site, I won't typically notice when someone de-friends me. But this feature puts this info in my face, so to speak. As the old saying goes: there are some things better left unsaid. This feature is articulating information we don't necessarily want to hear.
N. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nicole Ellison, PhD Dept. of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media Michigan State University nellison@msu.edu
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-- Fred Stutzman claimID.com 919-260-8508 AIM: chimprawk
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