Which points out that the current Facebook does not match the needs of real social networking (ie. multiple networks, different levels of trust, etc.). These things are hard to implement, but I feel that whoever does get it right (along with a killer feature to get users, such as what Photos was for Facebook) will be a winner.
The other feedback that I have from average Facebook users is concern for privacy (ie. a prospective employer finding your party pics), inability to control access easily (ie. your grand parents seeing your photos from a party), an overflow of information and the feeling of a 'fad' wearing out.
Facebook seems to offer this, at least in a very limited manner. But there's one big issue with their implementation, which is that if someone has decided to share content with a more limited group, there's no indication to those permitted to see it that it was "exclusive" and to whom.
Facebook's lack of clearly defined networks leads people to assume that the concept of "friend" is pretty egalitarian -- any content one friend can see, others can too.
This led to at least one embarrassing occasion where I said to a friend something to the effect of "You're Facebook friends with <person>, I can't believe you haven't said anything about that scandalous picture they posted." Then we discovered that I was permitted to see that content and they weren't. Drama ensues, and we both learn about a feature on Facebook we weren't aware of.
It seems like Facebook should somehow identify this restricted content in some manner, like "You can see this because you are college friends with <person>" or "You and <these other people> may see this photo."
The other alternative is that people only use Facebook to carry out their discussions about experiences and photos people post to Facebook, so that Facebook's access control will handle this for them. This seems counterintuitive to the whole "social" aspect, because presumably Facebook is a place for real-life friends to easily share content online.
I keep waiting for either Facebook to solve this problem, or for someone else to solve it. Google comes closest with their social network concept. On the one hand, I hope they pull it off. On the other, I try to minimize giving Google much more information about me than they already collect, so I'm not sure how comfortable I'll be on their social network. I suppose I'm hoping their success pushes Facebook to implement a similar concept.
In 2007 there was a big scandal on Absolute Poker where employees cheated internally and took millions off of players. In 2008, it was discovered that something similar was happening on UltimateBet. They refunded considerable amounts, I received a four figure refund but knew people getting as much as a quarter million back.
These two sites were semi-boycotted by the online poker community (twoplustwo.com is the HN of online poker) but this ultimately didn't work. The reason being that recreational/poor players didn't know about the scandal and continued to play there, which made the games so easy to beat that many players tossed their morals aside and made a killing.
One of the comments in that thread pointed to this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
Which points out that the current Facebook does not match the needs of real social networking (ie. multiple networks, different levels of trust, etc.). These things are hard to implement, but I feel that whoever does get it right (along with a killer feature to get users, such as what Photos was for Facebook) will be a winner.
The other feedback that I have from average Facebook users is concern for privacy (ie. a prospective employer finding your party pics), inability to control access easily (ie. your grand parents seeing your photos from a party), an overflow of information and the feeling of a 'fad' wearing out.