Facebook Will Lose Location: The Location-Flawed Social Graph

Facebook Places is finally here. Within hours of the announcement, many of the usual suspects have already relegated companies like Foursquare and Gowalla to the ‘niche’ pool.

I think (and yes, hope) that Facebook fails in this latest endeavor. Ok, with an ‘installed base’ of 500MM users they certainly won’t fail fail, but I would argue wholeheartedly against the following statement from Silicon Alley:

Facebook will now become the platform on which other check-in applications like Foursquare will be built. 

What is the first number that comes to your mind when I ask how many people you are interested in sharing your location with? On average? I bet it’s not 120.

120 is the average number of people the average Facebook user is friends with on Facebook.

As in the offline world, for each social group (family, friends, work friends, colleagues, gym friends, classmates, etc.) and for each social object (photos, videos, locations, news, tweets, status), users will rightfully demand unique privacy profiles to limit access to only those most relevant and appropriate connections. For example, I may want to share videos with classmates but not family; I may want to share location with gym friends but not colleagues.

Foursquare has in part been successful because, along with the emergence of a new social object (location), it has given users the opportunity to build (from scratch) a set of connections particularly relevant to that associated privacy profile.

My friends on Foursquare are only those people with whom I am willing to share my location. They tend to be in New York and they tend to be close friends (especially when compared to the 474 people I am “friends” with on Facebook).

So fear not ye social web start ups! The location-specific social graph is not easily replicable and the social graph subsystem of the Internet OS is only just beginning to mature. Purpose-built social applications that are subject to privacy policies outside of Facebook’s core competency will remain safe from the grasp of Goliath (for now)!

For more crusading against Facebook, see some of my prior posts here and here.

For more on social segmentation, see here, here and here.


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  • http://www.facebook.com/evanmrose Evan M. Rose

    Interesting. I wonder whether their API will be as open and comprehensive as Foursquare’s. I use it heavily in my app (http://www.nite-fly.com) to track the best nightlife spots in NYC based on location and preference. If they get uptake as expected, they will certainly be dangerous to Foursquare but I do agree that the 4Sq friend circle is a good deal more “real” than Facebooks.

  • http://www.kiad.org Olivier

    The point you mention (differentiating social object for each kind of group) is not really specific to location. I don’t use Facebook that much precisely because of the diversity of my contacts there, which make me feel either unconfortable if I publish something I don’t want one group to know, either confused when I know that one group doesn’t care at all of what I’ve published. But I also know I don’t represent the typical Facebook user :) If this was such a major issue, Facebook would not have grown that much…

  • http://twitter.com/alexmr Alex Rosen

    All good points, but why can’t facebook use location update by group to fix this problem? i.e. ‘just show group Besties where I am’

    Even if it has that, I agree that 4sq feels a little more safe since I know I couldn’t make a mistake and accidentally share my location with 450 people I don’t want to. It’s sort of like talking to a friend about a private subject in a bar vs. at home. Even if you whisper in the bar, there’s a chance someone else will hear.

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