Facebook Opening to General Public
Michael Zhang · September 11, 2006
Facebook is planning to open registrations to the general public. This might be good for their business and traffic, but will certainly create possible problems for existing members.
The reason Facebook has been relatively safe compared to social networking giant Myspace is due to the fact that they've employed a reliable way of verifying member identities through requiring email addresses from universities and companies.
If they remove this successful way of verifying their members, who knows what kind of person is going to sign up... I can already see Facebook going through the same child safety problems that have plagued Myspace.
Comments
fuck that. i thought the point of facebook was that each member was affiliated with an organization that could verify that person's identity.
high school network already half screwed that concept but even that at least still required an invite from someone at the same high school.
but now that they're planning regional networks it totally lifts that requirement. just being affiliated with a geographical area is TOTALLY different and kind of a ridiculously low entry barrier.
That's the point, until you start thinking about how you can make even more money and expand your userbase to cut into the userbases of other social networks.
I agree that this seems to diverge a lot from what Facebook was supposed to be about.