From its founding Facebook has been a playground for students. Its decision to expand beyond the educational world is a gamble. A year from now will Facebook be as passe as Friendster? Students seem unhappy at the prospect of sharing their online space with others. Will they abandon that space and leave it to the interlopers and move on to a new space that an entrepreneurial opportunist creates to replicate the Facebook features students seem to value?

It is interesting that Facebook will structure new communities on geographic regions. Wasn't the Internet supposed to bring an end to geography? This has been a de facto feature of Facebook. It originally limited membership to students at its birthplace, Harvard. Most of those students were on or near the Cambridge campus. As it expanded to include other colleges, a similar implicit geographic limitation has been inherent. Is there an implicit questioning of the limits of online community, and implicit recognition that f2f community and physical proximity are at least as important?