I came across a story today that summed up some of the challenges of social networking: “My boss wants to be my friend on Facebook.” I am already on Linked In, and I know how to use it for business networking because that is all it does. Facebook started out for personal networking, and after waffling for a while, I finally signed up for it. But I only want to use Facebook for business—I’m old. (I searched for classmates and found one person I knew from my high school, except a closer look revealed the Facebook member to be his son, now attending the same high school we did.) This story points out how difficult it can be to use Facebook for both business and personal networking.
Facebook is becoming more and more of an advertising platform, advertising that begins to take on a “Google meets Amazon” character. Not only can ads be personalized, but ads might also be shown to people in your social network because they are appropriate for you.
It would seem even more important, for Facebook to do this personalized advertising well, to separate business and personal contacts. My friends might share very different interests than my businesss colleagues, although there is lots of overlap, I am sure.
It’s amazing how dumb these questions will sound in a few years, when we’ve sorted it all out, but this what I am struggling with now. How can computers analyze social networks to see what the connections consist of? It’s almost the personal equivalent of anchor text–it is not enough to know that two documents are linked because we need to know why they are linked. Similarly, do computers need to know why two people are linked?
I have friends that I went to high school with and who love baseball and we’ve stayed in touch all these years. So if you want to find people of my age and background (Facebook knows it was a Catholic high school), then those folks would be good links for a personalized ad campaign. But I have business contacts who I know because they are in the search marketing business and they could be any age and any background and I don’t think most of them like baseball.
It’s a moot point with me for the moment, because I think I have exactly one friend in Facebook, so they aren’t spending a lot of time thinking about me. But when someone has thousands of friends, how does Facebook use that information? Sure, it can look at each friend’s profile to learn more, but search engines could always look at all the pages and that was never good enough.
Maybe these problems are different, but I wonder if Facebook will need to move to a system where you have several views into your information that you can allow people into. That in itself will be a social negotiation, but right now there isn’t much distinction between what different friends can see. (At least I don’t think there is.)
By setting those boundaries, Facebook can become a way to socialize across all parts of people’s lives and probably harvest more information about the connections between people (relationship anchor text) that can only help their ability in targeted advertising.
And it will stop people from getting the advice to give up Facebook. That’s what the poor woman was told whose boss wanted to “friend” her, and it sure isn’t the solution that Facebook wants her to choose.
