How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid. — Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy.
Context & Ripple Effects
Doctorow's column lands mid-way through Facebook's most aggressive expansion year: after opening registration beyond campuses, launching its developer platform, and courting professional networking with LinkedIn squarely in its crosshairs, the company has been optimizing for maximum connection between everyone who might know each other.
That growth engine is exactly what Doctorow targets: the same findability that powers the network also exposes users to the ex-co-workers, bosses, and acquaintances they joined to escape — and his argument lands while Facebook is already absorbing user backlash over Beacon sharing purchases with friends, giving the critique a live grievance to attach to.
First-order effects
- Users who feel exposed respond with self-defensive behavior — locking down profiles, declining friend requests, or leaving — which directly erodes the density of the friend graph that Facebook's ad platform and new developer ecosystem depend on.
Second-order effects
- Competitors can differentiate on control rather than reach: professionally-scoped networks like LinkedIn, which Facebook is actively targeting, benefit because their context separation means fewer unwanted exposures, forcing Facebook to build finer-grained visibility controls to keep both audiences.
- The Beacon controversy shows the second axis of the same problem — the network broadcasting activity users didn't consent to share — so pressure accumulates on Facebook to make sharing opt-in rather than default across both its own features and third-party platform apps.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, granular audience management — who sees what, per relationship — shifts from edge feature to the core product problem of social software, since a network's value survives only if users can segment the graph they're forced into.
- Sustained user distrust over exposure and data-sharing builds the case for external scrutiny of how social platforms handle personal boundaries, moving the issue from product design toward regulatory attention.
The trend: Social networks are discovering that growth through total connectivity collides with users' need for contextual privacy, making control over who finds whom the next competitive frontier.