Universitites in the Facebooking business
Cliff September 28th, 2006
Facebook opened its doors this week to the world. Of course, there were protests after the mini-feed scandal. But, of course Facebook users have been reassured that:
This doesn’t mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.
If and when users become fed up with Facebook (for whatever reason), they will abandon it. As danah teaches us, this happened to Friendster when it became too slow, and this may happen with MySpace in the future
In the mean time, administrators at various universities are still struggling to find the right way to “handle” Facebook:
- many are ignoring it,
- some are blocking it,
- some are “spying” on it,
- some are joining it,
- and some are trying to replace it.
This last prospect is the one that intrigues me the most–if you can’t control the for-profit social network, create one of your own that you can control! Schools like Texas Tech are purchasing U.Peers, a social networking system run by GoalQuest (a strategic partner of NASPA).
I see a few problems here. One of the appeals of Facebook is that you can link to your friends at various universities and colleges. Since U.Peers must be purchased by the university, it leads me to believe that students can only link to other students at that university. Second, these closed social networks are often motivated by marketing schemes or fear–which leaves the users out of the design process. Third, we know that free, advertising-driven software works because it has to be user-centered to work. By having the university/state pay for the program, it could have a terrible interface, not do what the users want it to, and continue without updates or changes because the bill has already been paid.
But now, U.Peers has one-up on Facebook–it’s university only. Facebook no longer has the “just us” mystique that it had. Facebook users fear that it will become another MySpace, and only time will tell if that’s true.