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Comment by lawrence | Hacker News Reader

And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?

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Respect for the end-user.

Privacy, perhaps.

Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis.

It is, however, true that Facebook is unlike Google in that, while nearly everyone wants to find information, not everyone wants to share information with other people.

Socializing however is all about varying levels of privacy.

I won't tell my coworkers or boss the same things I tell my friends, I won't tell my friends what I tell my close friends, and my family sits on the highest tier.

Maybe facebook will get this maybe it won't, or in general maybe it is impossible on the web where information tends to be so open.

Nobody at Facebook told you that Facebook was the best way to discuss the most personal aspects of your life with the people who are closest to you--though it includes private messaging, which may be good enough if you can't see them in person.

If you want privacy, don't share private information on Facebook. If you want to remain ignorant of your favorite sports team's latest scores or the most disgusting new genre of porn or how some movie you haven't seen yet ends, don't look them up on Google. The "next big thing" that Facebook is going to miss is not something people can already get by simply restricting their usage of Facebook, it'll be on a different axis entirely.

consider the privacy implications of sharing your "social status" with sharing where you are at any given point in time..

That's certainly what Facebook believes. What it doesn't really understand (possibly because its people have gone straight there from college and continued in the same atmosphere) is that normal people want a certain amount of separation between their networks, e.g. work/social/personal.

yeah but...those lines are blurring and not just because of facebook. partially to do with increasing ease of travel and long-distance communication, partially to do with changing attitudes about family maybe? surely there are many other factors, and more still around the bend.

this isn't to say that i don't ever want to say something to my friends but not family, or vice-versa. more often my issues with the "audience" for my facebook posts have to do with various groups interest in the subject of the post - people i went to high school with mostly don't care about python, or some great restaurant out here across the country.

Agreed that privacy and social networks are opposing ideas. But, they are opposing ideas only because how Facebook defines a user's "social network." The entire world is not my "social network." So, IMHO, addressing privacy may need a change in that thinking/definition of what a social network is.

"Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas"

No is not. Privacy is about managing social networking, the ability to connect to those I want as I want,not someone else telling me how should I do that.

As you get more social, you get more people telling you private things.

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