Mele’s Musings

Facebook redesign to give users more control

Smart move by Facebook .  BACN will be the social network killer if they are not careful.

Picture: Cybernetnews.com

Article excerpt:  Facebook Inc. is making sweeping changes to the world’s largest social networking site, aiming to give users more control and to curb new forms of spam, company officials said late on Sunday. Facebook’s redesign aims to make user profiles more dynamic by giving more prominence to the newest information, and it is cracking down on applications that violate privacy or user-control guidelines. “Users should have control of their information when and where they want,” said Ben Ling, the head of Facebook’s platform product management. “Users should share things because they want to share them.” Facebook will offer members a cleaner and simpler set of the Web pages which make up personal profiles. These profiles, which can be organized into tabbed pages, let users share tidbits of their lives with select groups of friends or colleagues.
The rest: Reuters.com

Musing:   For those of you not in the “know,” BACN is the name for SPAM in the social networking world.  Stupid, I know, but important nonetheless.  With open API’s, social networks like Facebook are setting themselves up for increased risk if they don’t create better user controls.  Facebook is rightly using this as an opportunity to fine-tune their offering and differentiate themselves from the pack.  By being more aggressive with developers, Facebook is going to protect themselves from allowing negative experiences to proliferate for users.  Apple is doing the same thing with iPhone apps.  The best idea is to open up the API, and at the same time to control the quality of the experience.  You can’t have one without the other and expect to survive.