3 Important Facebook Updates Coming Soon
Here's a quick look at some important Facebook updates that are expected to launch in 1Q 08: — 1) Friend Lists Privacy Controls — A few weeks ago, Facebook took the first step toward enabling more efficient friend management with the release of Friend Lists.
Context & Ripple Effects
Friend Lists began as pure speculation in August 2007 — coverage at the time asked what grouping would mean for Top Friends and even LinkedIn's contact model — before Facebook shipped the basic feature weeks later, with commentators like All Facebook calling it a killer feature and TechCrunch noting rivals could do little but watch. What arrives next, per this report, is the layer that makes lists matter: privacy controls that let each list see a different slice of your profile.
The timing is pointed. Facebook enters 2008 under user-trust pressure — commentator Bill Thompson predicted an uncomfortable year, citing the Beacon backlash — while the company had just joined Google and Plaxo in the DataPortability Workgroup, and confirmed analysis noted users spreading activity across other sites, leaving room for Plaxo and FriendFeed.
First-order effects
- Users get fine-grained control over which friends see photos, profile details, and feed activity, replacing the all-or-nothing visibility of a flat friend graph.
- For Facebook, list-based privacy directly answers the trust criticism around Beacon-era oversharing without conceding any of the network's closed-graph structure.
Second-order effects
- Rivals positioning around open activity streams — Plaxo and FriendFeed, both named in the portability discussion — face a competitor that can offer segmented sharing inside one walled garden rather than asking users to fragment across services.
- If grouped sharing works for consumers, expect LinkedIn and other professional networks to field comparable audience-tiering, since the same contact-management logic applies to business relationships.
Third-order effects
- Audience segmentation looks set to become table stakes: once friend counts outgrow the original campus-scale graph, every social network needs tiered visibility defaults, shifting product competition from network size to control granularity.
- The same quarter Facebook joined the DataPortability Workgroup, so the structural question for 2008 is whether granular internal privacy and cross-site data portability converge into a single user-expectations standard — or remain competing philosophies.
The trend: Social networks are moving from binary friend-or-stranger visibility toward tiered audience controls, as maturing friend graphs force platforms to rebuild privacy around groups rather than individuals.