Facebook: Opening the Doors Wider
The mega-popular social-networking site is opening up to allow anyone in certain geographic areas to sign up. Will this expand or dilute its appeal? — If Mark Zuckerberg had stayed in school, he'd be a recent grad, maybe settling into a new job or place to live …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second door Facebook has pried open in 2007. In May the company opened its pages to outside developers as a way to fuel growth, and analysts quickly began framing it as a social Web utility company rather than a campus directory. By October, coverage of the Facebook revolution treated the site's college-era exclusivity as the thing making it valuable.
Now registration itself is widening: anyone in certain geographic areas can sign up, no school or workplace affiliation required. The question Business Week poses — expand or dilute — lands on a founder who spent the fall on stage defending the platform strategy, including a November 7 appearance declaring that media changes fundamentally about once a century, all while the lawsuit over Facebook's origins remains unresolved.
First-order effects
- Facebook's addressable user base jumps immediately: geographic eligibility replaces institutional affiliation as the gate, pulling in adults and teens outside the college and high-school networks that defined the product.
- Existing users' core assumption — that their network mirrors a real-world community they chose — weakens overnight, which is precisely the appeal-dilution risk the article flags.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers buying Facebook's targeting get a larger but far less homogeneous audience, pressuring the premium the site commanded for clean demographic segmentation versus MySpace's open model.
- Rivals that never had exclusivity to give up lose their differentiation argument; the competitive question shifts from 'who can join' to whose social graph is more useful once everyone can join everything.
Third-order effects
- If openness wins, social networking consolidates around general-purpose identity layers rather than affinity-based clubs — the utility-company framing from May's coverage becoming the industry's default structure.
- The unresolved origin lawsuit aside, the strategic pressure on Zuckerberg is to prove that scale and intimacy are not opposites; regulators and users alike will judge platforms by how they govern an open membership base.
The trend: Social networks are trading walled-campus exclusivity for mass-market reach, converting membership scarcity into graph utility as the basis of competition.