Facebook's orders of magnitude of change

In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday).

My theory is, that fairly spare original design as a utility made it less flexible for individual users but more flexible for users as a whole – in other words for the changes that going from mere hundreds to hundreds of millions would entail. A pretty bare-bones social utility (like Twitter, too, as opposed to MySpace, which was always more of a self-expression tool than a social utility) is simply a person's social network visualized. [If this makes no sense, pls let me know or post your own theory in comments below.] "In its latest redesign, Facebook is playing up applications, games and search," USATODAY reports. That makes sense to me, because apps and games are one way users can customize their FB experience, and search becomes paramount simply because of the challenge of finding someone among 400 million users – but also grows the tension between those concerned about privacy and those who want to be found by old friends and long-lost relatives. For those concerned about privacy, by the way, here's a very handy how-to article: "The Three Facebook [privacy] Settings Every User Should Check Now": the ones concerning who can see what you share (updates, photos, etc.), who can see your personal info, and who can search for and find your FB profile with Web search engines.

Facebook: 'Facelift,' lawsuit

Seems like every week's a big week for Facebook! This week saw the beginning of functionality changes for users which will "over time enable user 'profiles' to serve more as individual Web pages that could convey messages far beyond the current 5,000-'friend' limit," the San Jose Mercury News reports. The Mercury News said changes will include: users being able to categorize their "friends" into "separate and sometimes overlapping subgroups, such as 'family,' 'close friends' and ''co-workers'," and users able to "more easily post links, photos or videos with their comments into the 'stream' of information to and from the Facebook site [parents, ask your kids to keep you posted on how this works and whether they're paying attention to privacy settings in the midst of this]." Meanwhile, Information Week reports that "a New York teenager has sued the social networking site and some of its users because of a Facebook chat group where she says she was ridiculed and disgraced." In such cases so far, the Communications Decency Act has protected social network sites and other Internet service providers from being held liable for content users post on their sites.