The Workplace Blog

Everywhere I turn people seem to be talking about Facebook. Whether it is the exponential growth, the shrewdness of Mark Zuckerberg or the new widget strategy, Facebook seems to be everywhere. In fact, the latest issue of The Economist magazine devotes a full page to the Facebook phenomena and to Zuckerberg.

But should you really care? Yes, and here’s something important that you need to know about Facebook.

Facebook is somewhere between LinkedIn and MySpace. It doesn’t have the stiffness of LinkedIn and nor the free wielding casualness of MySpace. It began as a social networking site for college students but now accepts everybody. While it is primarily social in nature, individuals and more and more companies are using it for professional purposes. Some companies treat it as an extension of their intranet while others look at the widgets as away to market to millions of users.

What’s tricky about Facebook is that once you accept a friend request, that person can see everything about you. The person can see who all your friends are, what photographs you have published, where you have commented and what you have said. The person can see the networks you belong to, the events you have been invited for and practically every piece of your Facebook identity. Why is this a problem?

Because you may have more personal information on Facebook than you realize. Most people begun using Facebook to connect with friends but over time start accepting invitations from peers and contacts in their professional lives. You may not want your boss or the person whom you share a cubicle with to know absolutely everything about you - your friends, your social plans, the places you’ve visited, what your high school nickname was….you get the idea.

So what needs to happen? Two things, Zuckerberg and his team should allow users to differentiate between person and professional relationships. Personal friends should be able to see everything that they’ve been seeing before while professional relationships should be more restricted. Secondly, Facebook should allow small and mid-sized companies to setup semi-closed intranet type environments on Facebook. Sure, that’s not the primary purpose of Facebook, but it will bring in more users and will allow companies to get an intranet on the cheap. Employees are more likely to view important company information when it is just one click away from their Facebook page than if it is on something totally different.

We all love Facebook and it is another example of the consumerization of IT as more of us in the workplace adopt it. But it also represents one of the perils of the consumerization – our professional and personal lives may blur more than we would like them to.