Phase 4 Of Facebook’s Systematic Attack On Twitter: The Everyone Button
June 17, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
If you were to distill Facebook down to its core magic, you’d have Twitter’s real moment news stream with a really expensive-to-maintain photo site bolted on.
And while Twitter isn’t precisely posing much of a current threat, Facebook isn’t taking any chances. Just as Friendster and MySpace tried to buy Facebook in the early days (and nearly did), Facebook is now trying to take Twitter out. First was the acquisition attempt. soon after came a focus on real moment subject matter streams. Today we say phase 3 - a search engine for public status updates and other substance that a small percentage of users are able to tryout.
Next week, we manufacture out, phase 4 of Facebook’s systematic attack on Twitter is scheduled for beta checking: the Everyone Button.
Facebook currently has complicated privacy settings to let users control who sees what subject matter they post. There are 27 different settings for most Facebook composition, plus another 17 for applications. Most users don’t bother.
If Facebook is going to leapfrog Twitter and become the place for the real moment news stream, they need more than a new user interface and a search engine (they must be livid to see things like this - Twitter will forever be associated with the civil unrest in Iran, just the most recent example). They need public substance as well. And that means encouraging users to post at least some of their
The current privacy settings don’t allow for specific status updates and other messages to be treated differently than other messages. That’s going to change. Users will be presented with a variety of privacy choices every moment a letter is posted to Facebook - everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends and friends. They’ll plus be allowed to customize setting further.
But the top choice, and the one most folks will choose, is “Everyone.” That means you can have an entirely private profile but occasionally choose (or, Facebook hopes, always choose) to have status messages, hyperlinks, photos, events, etc. be public and findable in that shiny new search engine.
It’s not clear that Facebook will be able to quickly convince its users to compose composition public. Just a couple of years ago there were revolts by the launch of the news steam itself, and it wasn’t all that expanded ago that college students were super not happy about all the old citizens being let in. But none of that matters. Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s world, and we just live in it. He’ll bend us all to his will.
Watch your back, Twitter. I build out Phase 5 is a doozy.
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