Congratulations Facebook!
500 million users a month is an extraordinary feat, and a real milestone in their stated objective of becoming a 'utility' - part of the fabric of our everyday lives.
500 million... if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest on the planet, behind only the gargantuan Chinese and Indian populations, and who's to say that it won't go on to eclipse those super-states too.
There is one aspect about Facebook, though that may yet prove to be it's achilles heel, and that is picked up by the insightful commentator in the Guardian's article:
"Facebook faces the risk that people will be unable to partition the different aspects of their lives from all the different "friends" they have there – and that could lead to defections unless the site can find ways to preserve that separation that we keep in real life."
Most people do not have 'one' circle of 'friends', but many social circles, some concentric, some intersecting and others discrete. Connecting and sharing content and opinions is different (means different things, needs to be handled differently) when considering relationships with partners, parents, children, extended family, close friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, clients, employers, and so on. Practically, this means more than just adjusting your 'news feed'. It's how you represent different facets of yourself (husband, daughter, dad, buddy, team-mate, boss, teacher...) to different people, while also retaining your sense of ‘self’ – let’s call that a single user account! Just as importantly, it’s about your opinions: trusted personal recommendation or critique is arguably the greatest influence in selection (from shopping to educational to political choices), but they are also the most telling indicator of one’s personality and should be shared with care.
There is much debate about Facebook’s ‘privacy’ settings – the argument revolves around what personal information should be hidden and what should be revealed to the general public, by default. I think it would be more useful to look at the issue from an angle of self-promotion and publicity, rather than concealment and restriction. After all, it seems we are now all micro-celebrities: never before have so many people been able to tell so many people so much about themselves, and that scale of broadcast needs careful management. Why not have multiple versions of one’s profile (think holiday snaps for your family profile, weekend pics for your friends profile, smart portrait for your business or school profile, sexy pose for your dating profile), and then elect which hat you wish to wear when promoting yourself by connecting, publishing and sharing content and opinions with different people.
In effect, this is what we do in a way, by having accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Match.com, etc. and we (laboriously) log in to each service and maintain profiles across multiple site. The real long-term winner will be the site that brings this all together in one place. I’m delighted to see its success, it’s a tangible indicator that the information age is maturing, but for Facebook to become truly pervasive, and not fade like many promising fore-runners, I believe it will need to shift its architecture towards a more real-life human social model.