They must did a lot of internal number crunching and came up with some pretty damn good upsides to counter the potential problems.

Would this dilute the the user base? Would I get now get spammed by Facebook add-bots trying to sell me something or send me to a porn site or show me a cool new band?

My guess is that this deployment will be similar to Gmail’s “beta” program where people will get limited invite codes and get to let their friends in. The invite method definitely would impede (not stop) the spam bots.

Interesting - I would have thought that facebook may have never opened their entire service to “anyone” - as originally it was all about “college” market.

Mike, you point out that “It’s also worth noting that users cannot frequently change geographic networks.” - this is a bit of restriction. i.e. I can join “myspace” and pretty much check out anyone I want, yet if I join “Facebook” as a “geographic location user” all of a sudden I am stuck with people in my geographical location.

What happens if I have heaps of friends in a US College or a US Geographic Location yet my location is Australia? Means that I cannot access them because I can only see people from my geographic network?

Also, how are they deciding on what the “geographic networks” are. You comment that they have “530 geographic networks, including some non-U.S. areas such as Paris and London.” - who chose the boundaries for these? Is it done on an IP basis? i.e. my IP is scanned and automatically assigns a location to me?

Either way, just some food for thought.

where’s the ‘Facebook PR’ disclaimer?

just sayin…

Being an avid early facebook user, I think this is going to further alienate their niche college demographic. Mark, if you’re reading this, (as much as we’re competitors), dude don’t do it.

Like I said, Facebook hasn’t been hiring idiots.

They must have gone through A LOT of sleepless nights hashing this out and saw that the upside is better than having a closed system. I would have loved to be in on the discussion.

Penis envy aside, what’s the point of chasing MySpace’s 80 mil (though only knows how many of those are ACTUAL accounts instead of spam bots) when you have the most ferocious and ADD subset of the market that are soon getting jobs with tons of disposable income?

Agreed; the facebook people are wicked smart. Had they not been, they wouldn’t have gotten this far in the first place. They have been hovering around 8 million users for several months and they need growth. It was only a matter of time before they opened up.

Does this mean that there is going to be room for another player, who can build nad who will actually sell for $750 million (good call Mike, you were the first to report this). The only invite only college network I know of now is Doostang, and that is more for the job hunt and career advice.

Anyone want to start a social network for schools?

Tcruncher2,

It sounds like it will be just like it is now with colleges, that you will only be able to browse profiles in your geographic network but can add anyone to your friends list and view their profile if they ok it.

As for how geographic locations are chosen, Michael makes it sounds like you chose your geographic location yourself, which makes sense since determining it by IP isn’t all that practical.

Some of us have decided it’s high time to replace Facebook. Visit our site at http://www.replacefacebook.com. For students, by students.

Wow, I think they are making one mistake after another in a chase with myspace. What they don’t understand is that facebook has become a right of passage for kids going to college. It’s like being able to join a fraternity/sorority…something that you can only do once you’ve reached college.

I cannot believe that they could not have become hugely profitable by expanded horizontally (colleges outside of the US). Instead, they are dilutting the brand name and coolness of the site. It will become another joe shmoe social networking site with 40 year old married men chasing 18 year old freshmen girls. Oh the horror…the horror.

Looks like there is an opening for another social network…one that is exclusive to college students.

Facebook really lost class…fast.

@Stephen - “Michael makes it sounds like you chose your geographic location yourself, which makes sense since determining it by IP isn’t all that practical.”
Understand that IP isnt all that practical - but then how do they place a restriction of where you are located?

The very fabric of Facebook originally was that it matched you to your college or university via your educational address. When this was originally extend out to the corporate network, the same principles were applied.

I just dont see how now providing unprecedented access to, as you put it, “anywhere” can seriously work. I totally agree with you that “determining it by IP isnt all that practical” - but surely allow users to simply “choose their location” is definately not practical at all.

This would mean that thousands, if not millions, of users could choose “location hotspots” which, as some of the others highlighted above, would mean that it would be open to spam-bots and clearly bring the very point of facebook to a halt.

Can you provide some more clarification around this Mike? As quite frankly, I just dont get how this is going to work?

Doostang? I went to doostang.com but can not get in. Can someone please help me? Is it like facebook?

Facebook would have been (and still would be) better served by focusing on monetizing their extremely loyal college users rather than constantly trying to get more and more users. At some point, increasing revenue per user makes more sense than just gorging for users.

Whatshisname (#9) is exactly right. There’s a reason why a lot of people opposed having Facebook open to high school students, even though when the change was made, it was clearly stated that there would be definite boundaries between the college-level and high school-level networks. Now that they’re making the geographic networks open to anyone and everyone, who’s to say that these boundaries will remain intact forever?

IMO, what made Facebook work was the fact that it was limited to college students and was so much more straightforward and simple to use than sites like Friendster and MySpace. There’s a lot to be said for being part of a group that is in some way exclusive, so now that anyone with an email address can be part of said group, it’s really going to change the way that people use the site — and as far as I can see, most likely not for the better.

Tcruncher2

I agree, but I am also certain that “by choice” will be how they do it. As Michael said, current Facebook members can already join a geographic network and can do it without any verification. And it makes sense, from Facebook’s perspective at least, since this decision is a completely financial one. It doesn’t seem they care that it will most certainly upset the current community.

Disagree 100% with what they are doing. They started a service for a niche - college students - and now they are moving completely away from that vision. The only reason they have got this far is because they have up until now differentiated themselves from the crowd.

They may not be hiring idiots, but if they don’t understand their consumers they ain’t worth a thing.

I definitely agree with whoever said something about the newsfeed. I really don’t care what my other friend said to another person that I’m friends with as well unless it had something to do with me. And all of the friend requests shown on the front page and join/leaving groups is totally unnecessary. And it’s also very annoying to see john doe remove ’surfing’ from interests or adding ‘billy bob’ to music or something. i don’t have a problem with showing that he updated his profile, but the exact thing he changed is not needed. i really did like the old facebook better. they should start making a even BETTER privacy control by allowing the users who do not want to use the mini-feed/news-feed turn them completely off. and for those who still want to use it, they can use it.

John Spencer:

If you are going to blatantly spam Techcrunch, at least have the sense to have a functional website up and running. It’s laughable how you come here to get free publicity without having built out the website yet. It’s great that you think you will replace Facebook but talk is cheap. Come back when you have something worthy to show.

People like Facebook because its clean and simple (or was rather) and because its limited to College, and Professionals only. Now its turining into JUNK. People are going to stop using it.

Facebook is going to be the fresh MySpace for about six months. What do they want to do? Kill Facebook? Who are these people?

Zuck’s first (and second and third) company priority is Growth, because along with stickiness (how often and how much an average user is on the site, a metric where facebook rules), growth decides which social network will be relevant.

Facebook can’t grow fast enough since it has saturated it’s eligible, core demographic. This plan has been in the works for over a year, with the questions revolving around how to track fraud and group people meaningfully.
The uninformed will holler again about privacy, but they should go complain instead to myspace, which as noted in my book, opens up all user information to just about everyone. Facebook will likely not change how college networks work. It may allow unvalidated friends to accept invitations, but would almost certainly track the referral/registration history, to be able to prune away bad branches of the invitation tree.

As a closed network, Facebook has gained success by modeling real life networks, towards which multiply.com is also narrowing its focus. Real life networks have a large geographic component, and they naturally include friends outside of school or work associations. However, I also have many people here in my geography who are not my friends, and who I don’t want to share in my information. As the book describes in detail, people closeness categories or some other meaningful way of sorting my “real friends” away from everyone in artificially bloated networks is increasingly necessary. I do not know that Facebook has a planned solution for this problem.

It is not limited to college and professionals - it is limited to american college and professionals. I would “qualify” for it if it would recognize my education, but having the location not available in facebook means ‘no joining for you”.

Now, one can say that the demographic of the US is enough and therefor it is bad for me but good for the site. It seems to me as if openening up is meant especially towards the internation user - while still trying to enforce some ‘local’ restrictions which just do not make sense from an international (or let me say: net based) view.

So far facebook for me stays a system which maybe nice but is not relevant until it is open.

They are turning people away now soon they will allow more users. More users TIGHTLY controlled = more money, why not?

Sounds like they knOW what they are doing!

Nicole: I believe Facebook accepts many European (UK, at least) and Canadian colleges.

Anyway, I suppose this is a smart move for them if they want to compete with MySpace, bebo, et al. But this should be far more alarming news to their users than those Newsfeeds.

I agree with Josh. This is BAD news for facebook users. far more so than that news-feed fiasco.

“Recently Facebook also created geographic networks and allowed Facebook users to also add one geographic network to their high school, college or corporate network.”

What does this mean? This is a very key part in your discussion but yet it is shrowded but the turmoil in th efollowing paragraph.

So will Facebook release this Open Registration once the majority of its users choose a geographic network? AND what is a geographic network?

This a US Based site. Are the geographic locations based by state, city, town? You said there are 530 Geographic Locations. Some outside the US.Why? Why are they expanding? Are Users constrainted to one geographic location when joining? Or they have achoice to add a geographic network?

A college student myself, it is a bad move. I do not have a profile, but I know that a lot of my friends use facebook solely because it is filled with other college people, not teenagers and seniors alike.

Interesting development in the growing social network scene.

This zukerberg character has got to be thinking that he’s in the middle of an ann rynd novel….

His will was simply too strong.. and the masses, who are but weak and simple minds, enventually bowed to his unrelenting vision of genius (not to mention his accutely targeted ad initiative based upon vast amounts of highly specific user information collected from mining what has essentially morphed into a all-encompassing consumer survey)

Brilliant!
If anyone doesnt yet see the beauty of Facebook’s “clean and uncustomizable look” from a dollars standpoint yet, I suggest they take another gander. With MySpace, those stupid bastards desire to make it a completely open and unresticited system effectively nullified any sort of system to aggregate users into highly specific demographic/character groups. Facebook on the other hand keeps it simple. What bands do you like, what books, what TV shows, what schools and where do you live etc… Hell, at this point, they dont even need to ask any more “questions” because there are plenty of phD marketing gurus out there who from simply that amount of information alone, can accurately determin your purchasing ::gasp:: habits, income, brand-taste etc. etc.

Not sure if any of you are familiar with MapInfo - its a semi-succesfull mapping business that has expanded out into the realestate sector to name just one of there moves - but these guys have actual names for the groups of people/consumers residing around a potential project-site. Think “20something wholefooder” or “just married mini-van mom”. And they’re amatuer hour all the way! Imagine what the 32 million dollar “brain trust” in zukenburge world is capable of

i am a college student and cannot register, and so by this news am glad that they will be doing this because my college does not offer email address to students. I like the way tha gmail did things by allowing their already registered users to send invites to their friends with invitation codes to register.

“the facebook people are wicked smart.”

Uh, right. “Hey guys, how can be build the valuation of the company since no one wants us for $2bb? Oh, right, lets just let more people use it!”

As other people have stated, they should focus on better utilizing their existing niche audience. I can think of a handful of large features they could launch to increase ad revenue per user, without ruining the experience of the site (and the stupid News Feed isn’t one of them).

In my opinion, Zuckerberg got extremely lucky with the success of the site (just a right time, right place thing), and continually shows his immaturity as a CEO.

Facebook’s strategy says something about the direction its headed in. I think Zuckerberg and Co. are preparing to sell Facebook. Catering to a college niche was the sites whole appeal. Like someone earlier said, getting a Facebook account is like a rite of passage. Now that anyone can do it, its no longer cooland exclusive. The company is thinking about the immediate future. By tarnishing the brand, Facebook now becomes a fad.

I think when Facebook lets the public in the first person I’ll invite will be my mother….and then my father….and then my Grandma. And then I’ll watch as people click and see my mother……and then my father…..and then my Grandma….just how Facebook has fucked themselves over.

Regardless of the marketing perspective that Facebook may provide for those with PhDs, 95% of all internet users have learned to tune-out any and all advertisements.

Zuckerburgs heading down shit-creek in my opinion.

The Student Bar ( http://www.thestudentbar.com ) could be the one to watch. It’s for UK university students only, and is slowly opening up to more unis at the moment. Who knows if they’d ever go stateside, but I have a friend at the University of Kent who is a member, and they have a huge following there - despite the presence of facebook. This sector could get very interesting soon if a gap in the market does appear.

Umm yea If they go foreward with this I’ll just go to myspace. Most of my friends feel the same way. The cool thing about facebook is the fact that you communicate and find your friends who are or have been in college. Wether or not the facebook creators know it or not, thefacebook IS for a certain sub-culture group (college kids). That is why we like it. Almost all of us have myspace pages as well, which allow us a whole lot more freedom than facebook, ex. they allow music, to design backgrounds, change font colors, and even allow music. The facebook is cool because it has restricted people who aren’t in college. Yea it may sound elitist, but that is why we like it so much. It makes us feel safe and surrounded by people who have gone through the same expieriences as we have. Thefacebook doesn’t have a chance. Yea it will gain alot of new users, but I know that it will lose many as well. I for one will be one of those people.

I just read a post today from Pete Cashmore over at Mashable.com about a new site called uspot.com. Check out the post titled “Uspot.com - Excellent Facebook Alternative” I am not in college so I was not able to login and check out the site because I do not have a . edu which is required to join the site but from the blog post it sounds like a really cool site with some great features.

In response to all this, I am starting FreezeCrowd, and it will be for college students worldwide. The site has been in works for a while now. We will be different from any of the others, more educational, more interactive, and people can really break the ice with FreezeCrowd! If you’re at all interested in an invitation, please check us out at http://www.freezecrowd.com and you can break the ice. We will be opening up for those with a .edu email address and allowing students, faculty, staff, and alumni on the site for schools in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. I am very excited about making a difference, and doing what is best for college students. High School students will not be on the site, and we don’t plan on it, but we may open up in the future, but only time will tell. I appreciate any support, and as you can imagine FreezeCrowd is definitely a cool place to break the ice. Check us out, and sign up for an invite and tell your friends!