Facebook: No Place to Hide

Facebook’s latest privacy changes makes it impossible for users to hide their profile photos or searchability (within Facebook), and defaults some features as available to “everyone.” These changes are strategically made to turn Facebook into a worldwide conversation – much as Twitter is today.

From the standpoint of competitive advantage, each time Facebook pushes public visibility, it erodes the unique value it offers to users. There are over 100 million active users on Facebook, it isn’t obvious how many more they want before the company will be happy. Facebook’s popularity benefits from two things: firstly, it has essentially reached full adoption, and everyone is connected to one another. Secondly, thanks to privacy settings, Facebook gives its users respite from their professional and public life. Users use Facebook for private and personal social networking, and Twitter for personal branding. If that’s gone, that’s just one more reason why Facebook could go the way of Myspace.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

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