What I've learned about Facebook

[davidlevine]

This is written from the perspective of a LiveJournal user, geek, and former technical writer. I hope it will be helpful to those of you who are new to FB or considering joining.

LiveJournal is a blogging site. The primary activities on LJ are writing blog posts, reading blog posts, and commenting on blog posts. Blog posts can include links, photos, videos, polls, and memes but these all exist within the context of a blog post. LiveJournal users have profiles and can give each other "v-gifts" but these are not important parts of my LJ subculture.

Facebook is a social networking site rather than primarily a blogging site; the type of interaction that FB's design encourages is broader, but shallower, than LJ's. Don't knock it... this shallow interaction, I believe, accounts for FB's much greater popularity with the general public. Because FB's population is so huge, it's much better than LJ for establishing and maintaining contact with more of your real-world friends and acquaintances.

It is important to understand that Facebook is a "platform" that supports a large number of "applications," only some of which are related to blogging. Even some basic FB features, such as groups and events, are separate applications running on the FB platform (provided by Facebook itself). Other applications are provided by third parties, such as Pirates and Vampire Wars. Because of this open architecture, the number of different things you can do on FB is daunting:

• Write a Note (which is what FB calls a blog post). You can also arrange for notes to be imported automatically from any other blog with an RSS feed.
  
• Update your Status. This is like a Twitter tweet, or like a blog post that is very short and written in the third person.
  
• Write a comment on someone else's Note or Status.
  
• Write on someone's Wall. A Wall post is kind of like a comment on the user rather than any specific post.
  
• Post a Photo, Video, or Link (with commentary). These are distinct objects in addition to being things that can exist within Notes.
  
• Become a Friend of another user. I'm not certain, but I believe that, unlike LJ, Friendship in FB must be mutual. I don't think there's any way for you to see my stuff unless I'm also seeing your stuff (but see comments on privacy settings below).
  
• Create or join a Group. These are pseudo-users like LJ communities.
  
• Create or respond to an Event. This is the thing that made me join FB, because some of my real-world friends were using FB to invite people to parties and handle RSVPs.
  
• Create or join a Page. "Pages" in FB are like users except that they represent a TV show, actor, band, cause, etc. Joining a Page is referred to as "becoming a Fan" of the TV show, actor, etc. Pages include their own Wall, Notes, Photos, Events, comments, etc.
  
• "Poke" someone (I'm not exactly sure what the point of this is, but LJ has an equivalent Nudge feature).
  
• Take an application-specific action such as playing a game of Scrabble, giving someone a flower, attacking someone's pirate ship, or inviting someone else to install the application so you can play together. I have not accepted any of these so I can't tell you any more about them. It seems to me that this is potentially the biggest time sink in FB.
  
• Update your Profile (add or change your address, relationship status, etc.)

Whenever you take any of the above actions (note: this includes Profile updates!), by default this fact is immediately announced to every one of your Friends. You can control which items are announced and to whom by selecting Privacy Settings from the Settings menu in the upper right of every page, then clicking "News Feed and Wall."

Your Friends' actions are visible to you in various ways, all on your Home page:

• The News Feed (the first tab on the Home page) is a list of your Friends' actions, filtered to only the most interesting items. The filtering algorithm is mysterious, but you can tweak it by either clicking the little pencil that appears on the right when you hover over an item (you can specify that you would like to see more or fewer items of this type or from this user) or by clicking the "Options for News Feed" link all the way at the bottom of this page.
  
• The Live Feed (fourth tab on the Home page, at least for me) is an unfiltered list of all your Friends' actions, updated in real time. You can view it in Log Mode (subjects only) or Full Stories by clicking the links in the upper right.
  
• The Status Updates, Photos, and Posted Items tabs on the Home page show only Status updates, Photo posts, and Posted Items (Links, Photos, Pages, Notes, etc. but not Status updates) for all your Friends.
  
• The down-arrow (last tab on the Home page) lets you select more views of your Friends' actions, filtered to specific applications or to specific Friend Lists.

Friend Lists are the same as in LJ... they are subsets of your Friends, the existence and contents of which are visible ony to you (I think), which you can use both to filter your view of your Friends' actions and to control which of your Friends see what information of yours. I strongly encourage creating Friend Lists immediately upon creation of your account, before beginning to add Friends, because it's much easier (and more secure) to place each new Friend into an existing group than to create groups after the Friends have already shown up.

FB also includes the concept of Networks. The available Networks are defined by Facebook rather than by individual users, and they consist of schools, companies, and cities or regions. You have to have a school or company email address to join a school/company Network. If you aren't in school, this feature isn't as useful.

One difference between LJ and FB is that in FB you have a great deal of control over who can see what information about you. (This is controlled by selecting Privacy Settings from the Settings menu in the upper right of every page.) For example, you can limit visibility of your cell phone number to certain Networks or Friend Lists, while making your home phone number visible to a different set of Networks or Friend Lists. Note, however, that your relationship status, gender, birthday, and political and religious views are all considered "Basic Info," and these are enabled/disabled as a group rather than individually.

You can also control which actions are announced to your friends, though this can't be filtered by Friend List. Note that by default, all actions are announced. If you change your relationship status from Unspecified to Married after you've been on the site for a few days, prepare for an avalanche of congratulatory responses.

In addition to all the above, you can send private messages direct to another user (or group of users), and chat in realtime.

Hope this is useful to someone! If I've gotten anything wrong, corrections are welcomed.

ETA: Here's an interesting article about some privacy issues on Facebook: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/melber

Comments

[darkerblogistan.livejournal.com]

FB seems closer to Myspace than LJ. And Myspace is simply terrible. (The same friends who told me I need a myspace are now telling me that *everyone's* on facebook. Wonder how long it will be before everyone is elsewhere...)

[davidlevine]

Facebook's user interface is much, much better than MySpace's (MySpace's is truly appalling). In fact, I'd even say that the Facebook user interface is better than LiveJournal's... it's certainly slicker, richer, and shinier, and if LJ's is simpler, it's because FB's is trying (and mostly succeeding) to handle a lot more types of information.

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

I briefly tried MySpace a while ago, and kept getting requests for befriending from people that I had no idea who they were.

I've been on FaceBook for a few weeks and rather like it. It has the Twitter-like function of the quick comment, but many more people I like to stay in touch with are on FaceBook. My Dad is on FaceBook even (but he hasn't befriended me yet). I've run into some old friends from public school. You're right about it being shallower than LJ though.

Jim has been on FaceBook much longer than I have, as his work group has used it for informal communication for a while.

[davidlevine]

I'm getting a lot of FB friend requests from people I don't know. Because FB is part of my publicity campaign as an author, I've accepted all of those requests, but I put them in a friend list with limited visibility to my personal information.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Because I am not an author and don't need the publicity, I've taken to responding to friend requests from people I don't know (or know very slightly) by sending them a message explaining that I'm trying to limit my friends list because I'm getting overwhelmed. (Frankly, it isn't even so much that I don't want them to see my personal information as it is that I don't particularly care about seeing theirs and I don't feel like having to add to my News Feed kill list all the time.) So far, only one person has been mortally insulted by this, and it's someone I knew casually 20 years ago in LA and literally haven't seen or heard from since!

BTW, I can see from this what a good technical writer you were. Thanks for all the tips!

[davidlevine]

You can also just Ignore the friend request. I think it was you who pointed out that this doesn't generate a message back to the requester, which means that they are very likely not to notice that you never friended them back.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

You can also just Ignore the friend request.

I tried this the first few times but discovered that many people just assumed that I hadn't gotten the notification and tried again. Plus, some of these requests are from people I know so I figure it's more polite to respond and explain why I'm ignoring their overtures of friendship :->

I think it was you who pointed out that this doesn't generate a message back to the requester

Actually, what I pointed out was that if you friend people and then remove them later, the Facebook dialog box says that the other person isn't notified. Stephen pointed out after I posted that tip that because FB friendship is reciprocal, you would disappear from their friends list and they might notice that but I don't think most people actually would.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the clarification. If you accept the friendship and then later unfriend them, they have no way to tell that situation from that you simply stopped posting.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

This was enormously informative, because my ignorance of Facebook has been deep.

Reminds me of the days when you were looking for a book that would teach Mac users Windows.

[davidlevine]

Yep! In this case I decided to write down what I'd learned.

[cscole.livejournal.com]

"This was enormously informative, because my ignorance of Facebook has been deep."

Ditto. Though I have a FB account, I have yet to discover how to get off the white opening page and onto what FB supposedly is all about. I'm printing out your observations and perhaps I'll try tackling FB again someday.

[davidlevine]

Next time we're both at the Fireside I can show you a few things. (I got started by uploading my address book -- bang, 175 friends.)

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reinforcing my belief that I belong on lj and not in Facebook.

[davidlevine]

FB is not for everyone, and I'm glad I saved someone the effort of learning that the hard way!

[janetl.livejournal.com]

It is a bit funny seeing this cross-posted in FB. :^)

[davidlevine]

Yep, but I figure there are plenty of new FB users, who are friends of mine on FB but not on LJ, who would like to read it there.

[ctgstr8.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this information. My daughter and I have been wondering what, if anything, on FB would be useful to us. I now can tell her that it's not our kind of place.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

What have you learned about the privacy and security issues? I haven't trusted Facebook ever since they came out with Beacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook)). I think if I ever got a Facebook account I would only want to access it from a dedicated computer - treating it like a virus.

[davidlevine]

Here are some things I've learned:

1. Everything you post becomes Facebook's property (they say you still own it, but they have a perpetual, transferrable license to do anything they want with it). I don't post any photos, stories, or anything else I care about the rights to.

2. Facebook applications can be viruses or Trojans. I don't accept applications, with rare exceptions.

3. You can opt out of "social ads," in which you and your actions can appear in ads targeted to your friends (Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall). I have done so.

4. You can opt out of Beacon (Settings -> Privacy -> Applications). I have done so.

FB probably doesn't meet your privacy and security standards, but I'm pretty lax in guarding my privacy online... I figure I don't have any secrets any more no matter what I do.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

The part that bothered me was that opting out didn't actually opt you out. The partner sites still saw your FB account, and could still communicate behind the scenes. Opting out mainly meant that you didn't know what it was doing anymore! There's still an active class action suit about this (see article referenced above).

[davidlevine]

Thanks for pointing that out. Also, here's an interesting article (from 2007) about privacy on Facebook in general: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/melber

[katybeth]

Thanks for posting this!

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Compared to Facebook, I think of MySpace as being for high schoolers, and other frivolous folks, but the Wall Street Journal and MySpace are teaming up for Davos (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/09/myspace-wall-street-journ_n_156546.html), the massively elite economic summit to figure out why you and I should be poor. OOOOO-- I suppose I should leave my Lefty-leaning thoughts at home.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

First - thanks David! I wondered what all the fuss was about regarding FB, and what it could do that I could possibly want. The answer is basically a lot if I want to invest a lot of time. Which would be great if I had some of that "lots of time" gathering dust...

Second, regarding FB vs. MySpace: there was a really interesting article a while back on the class implications of FB vs MySpace. Relating to the Iraq war specifically, it seems that officers & college educated opted for FB, while enlisted men & others tended to go for Myspace - and pointed out that the Army had forbidden Myspace postings, but allowed FB postings (this is from memory, so I likely have some of this wrong) as evidence of class discrimination (rather than secure vs insecure platforms).

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Now isn't that interesting about the officers for the enlisted. I think you may be right about class discrimination.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Could be. Could also be a legitimate (over)reaction to security concerns.
I am reporting this third or fourth hand, after all.

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

I do understand your point. Still, there is a prejudice toward one's own kind: officers to officers, and enlisted to enlisted.

My brief experience has shown to me that officers are smarter, on the whole. Specific people may be as dumb as a box of rocks.

Please give Donya a hug for me.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Googling for "danah boyd" and "myspace" or "facebook" and maybe "class" ought to turn up a wealth of sources on this.

Facebook vs Livejournal

[libertango.livejournal.com]

So Ulrika and I have been talking about this lately, mostly because I've been more active on FB recently.

FB is usually described (as you do) as a "social networking site."

In many ways, though, I'd say it's more of a user-maintained Rolodex. That is, the networking part is quite strong -- one can find people you haven't had contact with in years -- but there isn't much that people actually do with each other (this may well be people not using all the possible features, but I'm talking observationally). It's not particularly "social".

Exhibit A: This post of yours. You're tracked by 343 people on Facebook, and 409 people on Livejournal. But you've received one comment on FB, and 24 (including this one) on LJ (unless someone else posts while I'm writing :).

If one wants to update hundreds of people at a time what one's email or phone number is, FB is great. But if one wants to kick around an idea and get feedback on it, LJ gets much more activity.

The strange thing: In the recent kerfluffle about LJ's continuing health, I saw some outside commentators claim LJ isn't a social networking site. The logic appeared to be, it doesn't map well to FB, and FB itself defines what a social networking site is, therefore...

Just to check to see if this is an age-related thing, I looked over the FB of early-20s friend. Nope, not really much different in content from other Facebook accts I've seen, only in frequency.

Re: Facebook vs Livejournal

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

That makes way too much sense.
It's hard to get quality time with anybody at a party with even 200 of your best friends (and I know this from personal experience). The more you limit it, the more social it really is. So maybe LJ is Social networking and FB is social Networking.

Re: Facebook vs Livejournal

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I am on LinkedIn, and it thinks it is the definition of social networking beyond the family level.

Re: Facebook vs Livejournal

[libertango.livejournal.com]

I think it's more fundamental to each as a medium than that. (And thus, somewhat McLuhanesque.)

FB is an aggregator of data. There is surprisingly little provided in the way of interaction.

LJ is an aggregator of text. Which is to say, the lengthy explanations behind the data.

FB: "{X} is now single."

LJ: "Here's my 2000 word post on why I broke up with Harry... Please tell me I'm doing the right thing!" (67 comments)

Re: Facebook vs Livejournal

[libertango.livejournal.com]

Or, just seen: "Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better."

I'm not sure how well it really works that way, because of the 140-character limit. But hey.

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

I joined last night so your post is very timely and useful. Thanks!

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you can make this a FB document so that new FB users can access it. Concerning privacy, I try to keep my mother's dictum in mind: "Never write anything you would not want to see published on the front page of the New York Times." The NYT maybe going away (just a generalization based on other newsprint rags), but the idea holds true.

[davidlevine]

All my LJ posts are automatically copied to FB as Notes. The URL for the FB version of this post is http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=57800168400&id=656738277&index=1

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

I should have seen that I suppose, but I am not as conversant with FB as I should be.

Good night,

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

[Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] sent me here, after reading about indecision in wanting to join Facebook. I even took a poll about which name to use (I've been online as Sunfell since '94), and put in a third choice "No! Step away from the Facebook!" That choice won handily- my readers know a geeky Netrovert when they see one!

Your remarks about my material rights on the site clinched it- I don't want my writing, photos or activities shared around without my explicit permission.

There may indeed be long-lost acquaintances looking for me there- but they'll just have to keep looking. Perhaps the main difference between LJ and FB is depth vs. surface. I'm a deep person. It's an INTJ/P thing.

Thanks again for the comparison. You saved me a lot of frustration.