Facebook: Social Network or Global Utility?

This week, the five hundred millionth member of Facebook logged in for the first time. A number of sources covered this event and examined the implications of Facebook's steady transformation from website to quasi-utility. I studied articles from the BBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The results, when studied within the context of their parent companies, were relatively predictable. Even so, the respective slants provided by these media outlets prove to be extremely thought provoking.

Firstly, upon reading an article from the BBC, a fair amount of print was dedicated to the convoluted and insufficient privacy settings of, but BBC made note of the mild effect said settings would have on membership. In terms of Facebook's unsubsiding growth, BBC cited Stuart Miles of tech blog Pocket Lint, who said its' success was completely based upon "word of mouth...there are so many people...wanting to share with each other's friends--it's like a snowball." Mark Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook) was credited as a source as well, stating that Facebook was "almost guaranteed" to reach one billion users. The article concluded with an assessment of Facebook's dominance of the social networking universe, but did mention the upsurge of Twitter as an equally powerful and accessible enterprise.

Upon review of USA Today's appraisal of Facebook's milestone, an overwhelmingly positive, yet surprisingly detailed assessment emerges. Randi Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg's sister and marketing staffer) comments on the overwhelmingly international membership base (70% of Facebook's patrons reside outside the U.S.) With regard to the shift, Zuckerberg states, "Instead of looking at Facebook as a tool to look up other college students, you really feel like you can look up almost anyone in the world." As no commentary or criticism on Facebook's major privacy issues are made, this article seems to be extolling the success of the social networking giant.

The New York Times makes an interesting claim with regard to Facebook's low (29th out of 30) position on the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Facebook is bookended on that list by utilities. As the article states, Facebook sits alongside "...cable companies, wireless telephone service providers. Utilities. Here are services everyone uses, no matter how much people dislike the companies that provide them." On her blog, Danah Boyd, a social media researcher, claimed, “I hate all of the utilities of my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.” When Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook should be regulated, just as these aforementioned utilities, he refuted the comparison. “We’re here to build something useful,” he said. “Something that’s cool can fade. But something that’s useful won’t. That’s what I meant by utility." The concept of a competitor for this superpower is unthinkable in the eyes of the author, especially when terminology such as "utility", implying total dominance and dissuading challengers, is employed.

A political agenda seems to be revealed when one examines the News Corp-operated Wall Street Journal and New York Post's coverage of Facebook's milestone. News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch (who also happens to own MySpace, a casualty of Facebook's dominance), lambasts Facebook in the Wall Street Journal article. Not only does the SkyNews (another Murdoch entity)-sourced article criticize it's "complicated privacy settings", it notes "Its delays in placing a Child Exploitation and Online Protection panic button on the site, to protect against child grooming and bullying, were also widely condemned." Their reference to these issues seems to be an attempt to strategically place fear and doubt into the minds of concerned parents, hopefully driving these readers to restrict their children's access to Facebook. A more subtle approach is taken by the NEWSCORE-sourced New York Post. A less overt attempt is made here, where a financial analysis replaces the scathing criticism of the former article. An attempt to target the audience more likely to rescind their Facebook accounts upon hearing of security issues is a possible reason for the selectivity of News Corp's scornful evaluation of Facebook, but the brief account made in the New York Post as not to draw more attention to MySpace's competitor is a more plausible explanation.

I decided to use News Corp's publications to contrast with the more balanced summations of the state of Facebook due to their well-known $580 million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005. I was a bit taken aback by the brief, nondescript analysis employed by the vaguely tabloid newspaper-esque New York Post, as I thought their write-ups would be even more disparaging than the Wall Street Journal's.

Just for fun:

A graphic representation of Facebook's most current user demographics can be found here.