Facebook - Is Zuckerberg’s Law: sharing less is not an option?

[housewolf]

Facebook
Sharing it all

Sep 23rd 2011, 14:47 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO

AT FACEBOOK, they like to call it “Zuckerberg’s Law”. This is the notion, promoted by Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that the amount of stuff that people share roughly doubles every year. The social network is certainly doing its utmost to ensure that folk end up revealing more about themselves, whether they like it or not. On September 22nd Facebook, which now has over 800m users, unveiled a couple of significant changes designed to get people to share far more about their life histories and their interests in music, film and other areas.

The first shift involves people’s profile pages, which hold biographical details about them. In the next few weeks Facebook plans to roll out a redesign of these pages. The new-look profile, dubbed Timeline, will allow users to keep far more of the material they share over the network in an easy-to-use historical format and to add photos and other content from their past more easily. Facebook’s goal is to get people to create a complete online archive of their lives that they constantly curate.

At the same time, the firm is promoting a new generation of “social apps”. Users will be encouraged to report to their friends in real time via these apps that they are, say, listening to a piece of music, cooking a particular kind of meal or watching a specific film. Their friends will then be able to click on, say, a music app and listen to the same piece of music.

The underlying aim here is clear: Facebook wants to deepen its insight into what Mr Zuckerberg calls “the open graph”—a picture of all of the links that people have with other folk and with stuff such as songs, books and articles that they find appealing. The more that Facebook can learn about people’s lives and interests, the better positioned it will be to target advertising at them and to persuade companies to use it to market their wares. With an initial public offering looming next year, it needs to show that it can keep driving up its ad revenue.

The move is also designed to keep Facebook in front of rivals such as Google’s social network, Google+,

more...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/09/facebook

[Journeyman]

1. This is just hilarious - remember when people were incensed at "Total Information Awareness"?. . .

The very idea of such a government snoop put every civil liberties advocate on edge. How easy it was to circumvent the anger and resistance. Simply change the emphasis from stealth collection to publicly volunteering - what people were incensed to have the government gather surreptitiously they were more than happy to supply, gratis, if given the illusion it was to their social benefit.

[bighughdiehl]

2. Exactly

Now the question is how are they
going to make excessive "sharing"
compulsory for the Facebook holdouts
and the people who seldom bother to do one of
those status thingies? Fucking scary.

[aquart]

4. If you don't give them the info, they don't know the info.

[msongs]

3. now that google has become the corporate enemy will facebook be far behind? nt

[MrDiaz]

5. Umm

Nobody is forcing anybody to BE on facebook, if you don't want to share info then DON'T. What's the BFD?