Stay classy, Facebook...

A couple of paragraphs from a TIME Magazine article about Facebook caught my eye this week. First, the ubiquitous observation we see in pretty much every article -- about Facebook's design:

Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it -- a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.

But this next paragraph actually brought up something I haven't thought about before -- that social networks are as much about exclusivity as it is about inclusion:

Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid ... the most important function of a social network is connecting people and its second most important function is keeping them apart.

TIME published another article about Facebook a couple of months ago, where they made a related, also interesting point:

Facebook's News Feed updates me on whom these people have befriended, where they're vacationing, whether they went on a bike ride today, and the like. It's frivolous stuff, but you can see the potential of an online world arranged to emphasize the doings and opinions of those who matter to you most. You can see the pitfalls too, mainly in defining who matters. In the world of Facebook, friends don't drift apart. Either someone makes an active break, or the connection and the News Feeds go on forever. Get used to it.

There is a huge drawback in this binary view of friendship where you are either my friend or you're not, nothing in between. This is not how relationships work in the real world (apologies for calling offline connections the "real world"). There are different levels that is not reflected by this simplistic view of the world. Out there you grow closer to people, you drift apart, you get back in touch, you get mad at each other, you make up, you build a relationship over time... It's probably only a matter of time before online social networking evolves to reflect this real world behavior and give you the flexibility to define the intimacy level of your relationships.