Worlds Largest Social Network: The Open Web

But the online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are in public view.

Every link found on the open Web, inviting a user to click and go somewhere else, is in essence a recommendation from the person who authored the page, posted it or broadcast it in a Tweet. It says, Ive taken the trouble to insert this link because I believe it will be worth your while to take a look.

These recommendations are visible to search engines, which do far more than just tally how many recommendations point to this or that item. The engines trace backward to who linked to the recommender, then who linked to the recommender of the recommender, and so on. Its a lot of computation to derive educated guesses about which recommendations are likely to lead to the best-informed sources of information and then placed at the top of a search results page.

No friending is needed to gain access; no company is in sole possession of the interconnections.

The size of the open Web built without Facebook's help is hard to appreciate. In 2008, Google announced that its search engine had crawled, that is, collected and indexed material from, one trillion unique URLs, or Web addresses.

The beauty of the Web is that it is open, and anyone can crawl it, says Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google.

But Facebook does not permit Google to reach most categories of information placed on the site, says Mr. Cutts, adding, Google can only know what it can crawl.

Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University, sees it this way: What the statistics point to is a rise in Facebook, a decline in blogging, and before that, a decline in personal Web pages. The trend is clear, she said Facebook is displacing these other forms of online publication.

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, said his company provides Google with access to public profiles of members and status updates for public Facebook pages, formerly called fan pages. He said it also has announced plans to work with Microsoft on its Bing search engine, allowing Bing to publish the status updates of individual members whose privacy settings permit display to everyone.

The Facebook model of organizing the worlds information involves a mix of personally sensitive information, impersonal information that is potentially widely useful, and information whose sensitivity and usefulness falls in between. Its a tangle created by Facebook's origins as the host of unambiguously nonpublic messaging among college students.

The company's desire now to help out the world an aim that wasn't mentioned on its About page two years ago has led it to inflict an unending succession of privacy policy changes on its members.