Facebook celebrated its tenth birthday yesterday.

To expect anything to remain the same for ten years is naïve and Facebook is no different. Mark Zuckerberg has made many tweaks to his multi-billion dollar website along the way, but managed to stay true to his initial principles that allowed Facebook to separate itself from all other social networks. Until now.

In a Jan. 30 interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Zuckerberg revealed plans to allow users to login anonymously in a set of new apps that will be released later this year. This change is a complete 180 for the social network that once required a college email address to sign up.

One main principle that Zuckerberg has always kept is the requirement of a real identity and real personal information. In the past, he’s even referred to having a fake identity online as having a “lack of integrity.” With competitors like Snapchat and Twitter, which allow created usernames, exponentially growing and Faceook’s growth slowing, Zuckerberg is reevaluating his strategy.

“If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden,” Zuckerberg said in the BusinessWeek article.

Snapchat’s biggest draw is its fake usernames and the disappearance of content moments after it is sent. Snapchat is also an entity of its own. No Facebook sign-in. No links to other accounts. If you choose a good enough username, you have complete freedom to send risqué messages and photos to your friends without fear of it being traced back to you in the future.

Snapchat hopes to add more features this year and overtake the social market, similar to what Facebook did to MySpace in the late 2000s.

At the time of Facebook’s creation, Myspace and Friendster were the most popular social networks amongst teens. These sites allowed users to create usernames that didn’t match their real identities. Facebook combated that with the requirement of real identities to bridge the gap between the real world and virtual.

But now, as Snapchat’s success shows, that gap is closing again.

24-year old Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel declined a $3 billion offer from Zuckerberg to purchase the social app. He feels he has found a niche in the social market that hasn’t been touched by Facebook or any other social network. He may be onto something.

Facebook’s sign-in feature, which most apps have adapted, pulls your personal information straight from Facebook. This creates a more overall unified social experience over the web, but it also forces your real identity to follow you everywhere you go. Every funny photo and precarious message could be traced by future employers and could come back to haunt you later.

Facebook is realizing that society prefers multiple social accounts because that gives users the option to pick and choose who sees what. There is a very limited amount of content we share that is acceptable for everyone to see. It’s safe to say that most content sent on Snapchat is not for the eyes of the fast-growing adult population on Facebook.

Snapchat has pioneered the direction of the next era of social networking—one where users are free to post whatever they want.

Snapchat has also scared Facebook enough to modify its original ideals to keep up with the times. Facebook is no stranger to change, but this would be its biggest one yet. Like the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.

Aarick Knighton is a sophomore information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

 

 

 

 

Published on February 5, 2014 at 2:46 am