Facebook 'exposes members'
2007-09-26 07:13
New York - Social networking site Facebook, which signs up more than a million new fans every month, has changed tack and begun to publicly list members' profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!
"This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the web," said IT expert Om Malik.
Facebook is in fact aiming to get in early in the race to build a global - and potentially lucrative - online directory containing as many personal details as possible, such as one's CV, contact details, hobbies and even friends.
Currently 200 000 people sign up to Facebook every day and it now has 42 million users, according to the site. Newspaper reports say it aims to have 60 million members by the end of the year.
In the three years since it was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerbeg, who was then a student at Harvard, Facebook has burst into the global consciousness, becoming a kind of vast private online directory.
But its moves to take its members' profiles public means they could be found by anyone using common internet search engines.
Unless a Facebook user actively opts out of the scheme, their picture and name will from now on be available to non-registered websurfers.
"One of the great features of Facebook was privacy. You could be assured that what was in Facebook remained in Facebook. However, that illusion might be ending soon," said Malik.
Raising billions of dollars from investors
Several other sites are already positioning themselves in this market for a global online directory, such as Spock.com which has indexed more than one hundred million people and says it is "building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine".
The automatic site trawls public websites to collect, index, and display information that it finds online about individuals.
And its success has translated into raising billions of dollars from investors in past months, while other companies are now hungrily eyeing up the site.
On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported Microsoft was mulling an investment of up to 5.0% in Facebook, at a price which would make the site already worth some $10bn.
The paper said Microsoft had been in contact with Facebook Incorporated over the past few weeks, adding a 5.0% stake could be valued at between $300m and $500m.
But sources also told the WSJ that Google had expressed "strong interest" in a possible Facebook investment, and a company showdown could be on the cards.
Facebook is not alone in its aims to set up an online directory.
PeekYou says it has some 50.3 million names on its index, while Wink boasts some 217 million, mostly culled from such popular social networking sites as MySpace, Linkedin and Friendster.
Main aim is to attract advertising
Upscoop, created by the company Rapleaf, has indexed millions of profiles, and will go through your online contact list for free to see which sites your friends are using, as long as you provide the password to your email address.
The main aim of all these sites is to attract advertising, with made to measure ads for each web user.
Listing its members on Google will enable Facebook to attract millions of new web browsers, which is likely to swell its advertising revenues and boost its worth ahead of an eventual public listing on the stock market.
Facebook directors have already said they hope to raise some $10bn when they go public.
"Facebook company is easily worth much more than a one billion dollars already," said financial analyst Cody Willard. "They've likely turned down offers of about seven or eight billion."
Other personal search sites have more controversial uses. Rapleaf runs what it calls "an online reputation lookup" where it says users can "look someone up by their e-mail address to view their reputation related information, profile stats, and social networks".
Typing in someone's e-mail address could give you instant access to the sites they frequent, as well as an online rating about their reliability.
The aim is to give an online assessment of people, for example those using the internet for online shopping and trading, modelled on the system already used by the eBay auction site, or to assess potential employees.