Akkam’s Razor

Via Techcrunch [link]:

Sometime soon, Facebook will start allowing anyone to join directly into a geographic network, regardless of whether or not they are already a member.

Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s director of marketing, told me today that the feature would be released sometime soon, “probably in the next month, but no firm date has been set”. She also said that there are currently 530 geographic networks, including some non-U.S. areas such as Paris and London.

After getting their asses handed to them regarding the mini-feed drama, I have to think there will be a little more planning and perhaps a different tact on the rollout.  And if a user is truly concerned, they can just remove any of the geographic data from their profile.

At the same time, why get into something that other people (MySpace) already dominate?  They're better off differentiating themselves - they have "real" people now.  Presumably, you had to have a school email or participating company's email address.  Now anyone with a yahoo, hotmail, or gmail email can join.  There's less of a guarantee of legitimacy.  I'm fine with the concept, just not the philosophy - they just degraded the value of their userbase. 

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