My first good impression of Facebook is its care for Privacy.
When user wants to add friend, Facebook prompts for the relationship with the recipient and the system verifies if the information matches. Correct me if I’m wrong, but many people who prefer this strictness in Privacy turn out to be diligent and thoughtful enough to savvy technology and social effects of the internet.
This solves a problem of many contemporary social networking sites such as MySpace: arbitrary networking leads to privacy abuse.
However, this in turn limits the ability to discover new sites and new people. Most of users’ Facebook networks likely come from already known sources. The chance to meet new people, or discover new sites is limited proportionally to the privacy limit.
My conclusion is that this variety of usability and website nature gives web-surfers more choices of services and more channels of connection.
The more choices the merrier.
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Tags of this article: choice,facebook,information,myspace,networking,privacy,security,social,usability,web-2.0.
Last update August 30, 2007
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August 30th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
As far as I know, you are not required to declare the relationship at the first step. Just (request to) add friend and wait for confirmation. “user must fill in the relationship with the recipient” — that should be a further step and isn’t it an option? Correct me if I’m wrong.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Thanks Thien,
It’s true that the relationship, at some steps, is optional.
I edited “require” to “prompt”
Thank you,
Tai