It was revolutionary, the way it bridged distances and brought friends together, but now it is inching towards making a digital record of life itself. The aggressive changes Facebook introduced recently, including features such as Ticker, Subscribe, Open graph and Timeline, attempt to change the way the world looks at social media. The users may be annoyed with the threat to privacy, but whether they will have any say remains the question.
Unlike Twitter and Google+, which focus on exchange of messages, Facebook aims to be ‘the' online destination where people can perform an array of activities while logging their history. The centrepiece of the new design is Timeline, a visual history with details of every major event of the user's online life. Users will be able to automatically share activities such as viewing, listening and reading on the site.
'Frictionless experience'
Some believe this will bring in a ‘frictionless' experience with fewer dialogue boxes seeking permission to publish an activity, but the risk of an overload looms large.
“Users have to be cautious when commenting. Any comment you leave on a status update will be sent to the tickers of every friend,” points out Prathap Menon, a social media analyst.
Similarly, while users can control what they share, they will have to scroll through their posts and manually hide or delete them. However, experts feel not sharing actually diminishes the impact of social networking. “Users can control and act in an appropriate way,” says Rohan Varma, a blogger.
“One probable reason why Timeline was created was for users to feel that their Facebook page reflects their personality. But in countries like India, hardly 15 per cent of the users actually fill in their real details anyway,” Mr. Menon adds.
There is also the fear that the number of security breaches might increase. For instance, every time someone creates a list with colleagues from a specific job, this is tagged to their profile. Having indexable data makes targeted attacks easier, say experts. Concerns also persist on what happens if the data on cloud platform goes down, or if the business model is changed.
“It was our desire to tell ‘stories of our lives' that led to the explosion of blogging. This phenomenon of time line being your digital identity will soon pick up,” says Chris Malor, a Microsoft security expert.
Aggregation of data
Facebook's move towards being the internet's new hub also raises the larger question of what people uncomfortable with this aggregation of data can do. As R. Aarthi, a user, points out: “Quitting Facebook might be the cool thing to do now, but I do not think many would.”
