Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In “The Great Wall of Facebook,” Wired’s Fred Vogelstein contends that Facebook and Google are approaching a “full-blown battle over the future of the Internet.” Vogelstein’s assessment boils down to two predictions: (1) Facebook will lead and monopolize a fundamental shift to “a more personalized, humanized” web search, based entirely on information supplied by one’s social network; and (2) the vast amount of personal information supplied to Facebook by third parties and users themselves will (barring user revolt) yield massive profits through online brand advertising. A prediction that Facebook will gain some advantage over Google through its proprietary data would be hard to argue against. But Vogelstein’s particular vision of that general future—in which Google is conquered by a News Feed search based purely on users’ networks—runs into problems.

According to Vogelstein, the new era of search will begin as Facebook reaches critical mass, with more people you know injecting more of their thoughts into your News Feed more frequently. Facebook’s new Search interface will then allow us to take advantage of the rich feed by crawling status updates and posted links. Soon enough, we will realize that the advice, opinions, and recommended reads of people we know are more valuable than those of “some anonymous schmuck” that Google turns up, and Facebook will overtake Google as “a gateway to the Web.” Crucially, almost none of the feed’s information will be available through search engines, since, according to Vogelstein, “what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers.”

I don’t share Vogelstein’s vision of the future. Purely social-network-based search is a useful tool in conjunction with traditional web search, but to argue that it could seriously compete with traditional web search—even for personal, opinion-oriented queries—disregards the immense value provided by aggregation and online anonymity. That is, why limit yourself to the opinions self-selected network when you can also access the wisdom of a diverse, decentralized crowd? And for sensitive issues, why limit yourself to what people are willing to attach to their identities when you could have access to the whole story that anonymity allows?

Volgenstein’s “Great Wall” is also in clear conflict with the Facebook’s steady evolution into a more public space. Some of these recent changes, while superficial, have been important in introducing users to a sense of Internet visibility. The profiles of unconnected users now appear as a full-size page and picture, identical in form to the profile of a friend. As Douglas Rushkoff points out, the much-publicized vanity URLs “reveal...just how close to the real Internet [users] have been all along.”

At the same time, Facebook has been making substantive changes that will in fact allow its users’ information to be much more publicly accessible. In a press teleconference yesterday, Facebook announced that for every aspect of their profile and every individual status update, users will soon be able to set their privacy preference to “Everyone”—that’s everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook. The privacy controls, newly streamlined, will be introduced through “Transition Tools,” which will highlight the “Everyone” option and encourage users to make more information available to everyone by default.

These long-developing changes are widely seen as direct challenges to Twitter, and rightly so—especially since the new Facebook Search will include publicly broadcast updates in its results. But the changes also show that if Facebook is planning to oust Google from its central role on the Internet, building a Great Wall around the entirety of its users’ data is not a part of that plan.

Instead, Facebok may challenge both of its rivals by evolving into a sort of hybrid private-public website. If more users make more of their status updates public, Facebook Search will acquire the robust aggregation effects of the wider Internet, while retaining its socially centered core. At the same time, the more personal content that users choose to keep private—the stuff Twitter and Google both lack—would stay behind Facebook’s wall, giving the company a distinct advantage in terms of advertising revenue.

Of course, whether they can do all that and still respect users’ privacy is something we—and, as time has shown, the Facebook community—will be keeping a close eye on.