Facebook Grows Up

What does Facebook get from this? If all goes well, much of what people do on the Internet will be accomplished within Facebook. Instead of eBay, you can buy in Facebook's marketplace. Instead of iTunes, there's iLike. In other words, Zuckerberg wants to keep you—student, graduate or graybeard—logged on to Facebook, organizing virtually everything you do via the social graph.

Though some are grumbling about this "walled garden" system's being overly cloistered—and others believe that adding all those applications muddies up Facebook's austere appearance—1 million people a week are flocking to Facebook. And the international push is only beginning. While the site is now available only in English, Zuckerberg says that versions in other languages will appear soon. (Facebook is already the top Web site in Canada, and the geographic network with the most Facebookers is London.)

Still, one big question dogs the company in its attempt to leverage the social graph in the same felicitous—and wildly profitable—way that Google found fame and riches through search. Can Facebook be as much a presence in the life of graduates and geezers as it is to college students? Zuckerberg can't see why not. "Adults still communicate with the people they're connected with."

At this point, though, much of the grammar of the site (as well as much of the first wave of applications) is still tilted toward student life. David Rodnitzky, 35, a San Francisco marketing executive, was having a fine time on Facebook until he installed a widget called "My Questions." Unbeknownst to him, it sent out a query to people on his friend list, specifically: "Do you kiss on the first date?" "Here I was, asking some of my company's venture capitalists, along with some of my guy friends, if they kiss on the first date," says Rodnitzky. "Probably not the best way to interact." Nor is it clear whether grown-ups embrace the new SuperPoke third-party application: instead of a mere poke you can bite, slap, bump, spank, lick, grope or head-butt friends, acquaintances and, uh, business colleagues.

Also, there's a question of whether older people want to interact with fewer or more people as they nestle into their family and work lives. For some, use drops off right after they grab their diplomas; Stephanie Shapiro, 21, a recent Dickinson College grad, has seen her Facebook time drop from up to two hours a day to less than an hour a week. "It's almost an afterthought," she says. It's often one of life's pleasures to lose touch gracefully with people you'd had quite enough of—with a lifetime of Facebook you will have to delete them cruelly if you want to get free. "The social graph will get incredibly meaningless," says Berkeley's Danah Boyd. "Do you really want to be speaking with everyone you ever met?"

Facebook must also deal with persistent privacy concerns. When the company first rolled out the News Feed, and any change on a user's page suddenly began scrolling on the screens of anyone who'd added him or her as a friend, the social graph went bonkers: more than 700,000 people joined a user group called "Students Against Facebook News Feed." The company acted quickly to install privacy controls to let people opt out of the information flow, and the crisis cooled, though Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says that setting privacy preferences is still too complicated. The company says that plenty of protections are built in. "Facebook is about replicating the social restrictions of the offline world," says its chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly. The problem is that Facebook is on the Internet, and it's all too easy to circumvent those and dig up private stuff. This is all too clear from the experience of political offspring who seem engaged in perpetual competition to embarrass their parents.