Advertising will come to Facebook, the social networking site formerly restricted to those possessing .edu addresses and now opened to the public for membership.
At the time, Facebook had about 9 million members. That number increased dramatically when Facebook opened its site to the Internet masses. News of that came from Facebook’s Carolyn Abram, who blogged about the decision:
We started at one school, and realized over and over again that this site was useful to everyone-not just to Harvard students, not just to college students, not just to students, not just to former students.
This doesn’t mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.
When the Microsoft and Facebook deal was announced a month ago, we expected the companies to move quickly to implement the advertising features. MediaWeek reported on the new ad service being deployed at Facebook, but Microsoft does not get a mention:
The new placement, dubbed Sponsored Stories, appears within Facebook’s News Feed platform. News Feed, which Facebook launched earlier this month to a storm of controversy, provides users with a constantly updating list of “news items” on their personal profile pages. Those news items appear whenever members of individual Facebook users’ network make changes to their own profiles, such as uploading pictures or posting comments.
That controversy involved what Facebook users considered the equivalent of stalking, as other users could see if they had been delisted as friends from another’s profile, for example.
Facebook had to hastily erect new privacy protections for its users. Now the news of ads in their feeds has arrived, and it’s becoming fashionable to predict whether this is the end of Facebook. The exclusivity of being a college-only network has been diminished slightly, even though Facebook has promised to keep them functionally separate.
The .edu-only email requirement is one that could be replicated easily. All it would take is another developer on a campus somewhere, perhaps at the Stanford stomping grounds of the founders of Google and Yahoo, to create a Facebook-like clone.
If it gained support at the developer’s campus, as Facebook did at Harvard, a new site could draw off the younger crowd, piping them to it instead of watching them go to Facebook. Those who doubt that should recall how AltaVista was the search engine of choice online, until Google came along. Then, it wasn’t.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
