Recently, Facebook has added an Election section, presumably to provide a platform for civic action as well as generate income from candidates via their purchase of voter profiles and demographic information – ie. users who supported Candidate B also supported Issues X, Y, and Z.
Then to promote it, they turn on the mini-feed, so that when you see a friend join a group that you identify with, you join as well. An unfortunate consequence is that every single change, addition, or deletion you make on your Facebook profile is also shared with everyone. Also, by default, everyone in your network can see everything. The problem here being that the people, previously unrelated, who joined a political group, became part of your network, increasing the number of people who see your profile. Needless to say, there was quite a bit of discomfort amongst the FB users, eventually causing FB to ammend the feature to provide better control.
Then, lastly, open up FB so that the largest number of people, basically anyone with a pulse and an email address can join, to everyone, adding in geography, making FB applicable to state's governor races, congressional primaries and regular elections, and of course, president. Likewise, if you made no changes to your privacy settings, even MORE people will be seeing your profile.
The eventual goal would appear to be for someone to buy FB – keep in mind that MySpace was bought by NewsCorp, ie. Rupert Murdoch <shivers>, for $580m earlier this year. The ridiculous number bandied about at the time for FB was $2 BILLION dollars (they turned down an offer for $570m).
Do you think, after everything they've done, chasing the money, that FB is worth more or less? And by diluting the specificity of the user base, and losing it's special character, will they become nothing more than an irrelavent MySpace clone?
The cruel irony is that democratization of information, the exact thing that social networking (and Web 2.0) provides is also the check against unwieldy growth. Facebook gave it's users to organize, swarm, and take action, presumably in ways that benefit the owners. However, when something happens which the community finds distastefull, they can rapidly take action, stopping them dead in their tracks. Community owners may be beginning to realize that letting everyone have a voice is more complicated then they may have anticipated.
