Barry Goldberg

The MacArthur Manifesto

July 1st, 2008

MacArthur Manifesto

While recently listening to an edition of the Net@Night podcast, Amber MacArthur introduced a new segment of the show called Beef of the Week.  She explained that she has basically been shutout of her Facebook account for months now.  Turns out that she has too many friend requests and the Facebook platform cannot handle it.  She is prevented from logging in and accepting the thousands of friends requests she has received.  When she reached out to Facebook their answer was basically that there was nothing they could do and that she might try deleting all of the people that were attempting to befriend her.  Not very social.  Now Amber is kind of a Social Network poster child in that she dedicates most of her time promoting social media and networking and believes that the web is the best place to form communities.  Seems to me that building their platform for and supporting users like Amber is in Facebook’s own best interest.

We use social networks like Facebook for many reasons.  Most people use it as a place where they can keep up with their friends no matter where they are.  But we are also seeing more and more groups being formed that relate to causes and charities.  These are very important communities and networks like Facebook become more relevant as they host and support them.  I spend a good part of my day thinking about how to promote organized social networks.  The questions I ask myself include what tools or mechanisms are best for a particular social network.  This typically boils down to a feature set and target demographic.  NOW I am thinking I have to also consider if the platform can handle the load. 

Should I create social networks on Facebook knowing they may not be able to handle it if it becomes popular?

User loyalty of Social Network websites has proven over time to be fickle.  For the most part users go where their friends are.  However, as we have seen in the past - my friends used to be at MySpace and now they are at Facebook.  In a couple months they could be somewhere else.  My main point is that if Facebook as a platform cant handle the vast numbers of people who flock to these types of communities they will fail and the users will go someplace else.

The Mission: To use Facebook against themselves.  We must convince Facebook to fix their platform and to support people like Amber so we can continue to build important social communities.  Maybe we should create a "Free Amber" Facebook Fan page.