Facebook, Now Too Cool for School?

A few weeks back with all the publicity surrounding social networking we thought it would be only prudent to sign up for a Facebook account. This way we could better understand how it works and how to it might be used as a marketing tool for certain demographics.

During the sign up process though it became immediately clear that without a school email address (something ending in .edu) we were out of luck at Facebook.com’s admissions office. If your attempt hailed a similar fate then you were probably excited to learn of yesterday’s news.

Facebook has just announced that they are planning on opening its doors to the public. This really should not come as much surprise since market leader MySpace continues to widen the gap between the number one and two social networking sites. Facebook is looking to increase its membership outside of the High School and College demographic. With the new change to their admissions policy you no longer need to be enrolled in school to sign up for an account.

This announcement comes on the heals of a major Facebook member backlash with their recent facelift that included RSS Feeds for members. “We really messed this one up,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in his blog on the site. “When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. …we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were.”

Mini-Feed shows all the latest information someone has added to his or her Facebook profile, including any notes, photos or who’s dating whom. Those changes are then sent to the people on the user’s friends’ list. In a similar fashion, News Feed updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so subscribers get the latest headlines generated by the activity of their friends and social groups.

The RSS feed backlash came about because of concerns with members’ privacy, something that has differentiated Facebook from its competitors including MySpace.

Privacy was also a factor with the news of open enrollment. New people will only be able to see others in their geographical network. So unless college students join geographical networks in addition to their college networks, they should still be inaccessible to the random searcher.