Facebook For All: Why I Think Corporate Facebooks Are The Way To More Growth

As you may know, facebook has a significantly greater sense of trust than MySpace. Why is simple: the user base you have access to consists of fellow students at your school. Email confirmations discourage untruthful postings. So it is certainly true that by drawing boundaries, trust has been created in facebook. Given facebook's new functionality that lets you specify a geographic area you are in, what about the risk that the trust will be soured when it is open to everyone in a geographic area like a city? At that point, you can see anyone's profile because you can simply change what geography you are in. Of course, the argument for trust being maintained is that all users were at least confirmed at some point by their student email address, so at the least you know they are a student. Presumably they share the same geographic location as you, but they easily could not. Certainly this is a trade-off situation for facebook management: do you trade-off some of the inherent trust in the network for providing increased access to others' profiles? For the sake of encouraging alumni users to keep using the site, I do not think they had much choice. But they have a huge opportunity to leverage email confirmation within companies, as I detail below.

Ideally, if IP address locating was actually accurate, facebook could simply identify where you are located based on your IP, and that would be your geography. Instead, it is relying on the trust of the users to input the correct geography. While I think most people will answer truthfully, "most" is still on risk on the site given now literally all users must be verified through email as being part of a certain school and thus can only see information from people at that school. Certainly there are loopholes already -- for example, people that are not in facebook schools who get alternative email addresses just to sign up for a facebook account -- but the geography setting takes it to a new level. My suggestion is the facebook be very careful going forward by observing habits of users that regularly change their geographic location: for example, limiting the number of times in a month that you can change your geographic location to just 3. That would at least make it more difficult to scan the profiles of masses of people.

Regarding the rumors of new services being built, I have no hints as to what they will ultimately launch, but I have some original ideas of my own. I think facebook has a unique opportunity to leverage the source of its power -- the confirming of .edu email addresses -- to use it as a confirmation that users work at companies. This would of course require a huge database of domain names and the names of the associated companies, but it could be done easily in this way: facebook could become a domain registrar (cost of about $15,000 according to well-placed people in the industry) and thus have access to all the data associated with every domain name record. Every domain of course has a "registrant," so facebook could take the registrant listed for the domain and identify it as the company name. For example, say a user wants to verify they work at Yahoo, then the user would input their "@yahoo-inc.com" email address and click the confirming link. Since the registrant for "yahoo-inc.com" is of course "Yahoo! Inc.," that would be the company name listed in the user's facebook professional profile. The default privacy setting would be to permit Yahoo Inc. users to see the user's professional profile, and to not permit Yahoo Inc. verified users to see the user's personal profile. Enabling verification of companies would open up a whole new area for growth: corporate facebooks. Facebook must be careful to not tread on its current college social network, which is why locking out verified company users (who are not verified with a .edu) from seeing .edu verified users' profiles is critical to maintaining the necessary level of trust.  Bottom line is that the two have to be separate.  In my research, I have found companies are unwilling to create social networks like this for their companies for fear of the legal implications if users posted inappropriate information. Of course, major companies do mostly have company directories, but they are far from having the social component of facebook. Bringing facebook to companies would enable employees to identify other employees in the company working on similar projects or who have whatever needed expertise. The corporate version may not take off immediately, but planting the seed now is important to leverage all the new alum's: they are all potential marketing pieces for facebooks within companies. Facebook usage numbers speak for themselves: users love the site. I think some of that love will be lost as people become alums, but it does not have to be: migrating alums into corporate facebooks would leverage the same powerful ideas that have driven facebook's growth thus far: email/identity confirmation and a community with both cyber and physical boundaries. Companies have that. Plus there is a powerful idea within corporate facebooks that university facebooks do not have: there's no competitive reason why students at one school do not want to share information with students at another school, but that is certainly critical at companies.  By playing to that and making a closed corporate facebooks, trust could be fostered and encourage employees to share the necessary information (past projects worked on, expertise, current projects, colleagues at work, etc) for the betterment of the companies.  Certainly any person could start offering this service, but no company is better positioned than the facebook to roll this out on a national level.  Of all, facebook has the best chance of getting traction by leveraging its millions of users (by the end of the year, the company expects at least 6.8 million users).