We're designing stuff, we look not necessarily just about what any given users going to experience,but what's going to be better for the whole coummunity and the whole product. And I mean, it's gonna be a lot of trade-off going all over the place in a product. Probably the most that you see every day is that you can't see the profiles of people at other schools. That's a really a major trade-off in the application.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this, we spilt up the user base by what school they go to and we make it so that people at a given school can only see the profiles and contact information of people at their school. And the reason for this was mostly to, because we realized that the people around you, at your school, are the people who you want to look at mostly anyway. And if we made the space too broad and let anyone see your information. then that probably fine. I mean, look up some people, but you also probably won't put up your cellphone.
More than a third of people on Facebook have their cellphone up there, and that's something that's something useful for the application. So in designing it, this was a trade-off that we made. I kind of thought of what was wrong. I said, well, what would be more useful? Would it be better for people to be able to see everyone and maybe not feel like this is a secure environment in which they can share their interests and what they thought and what they care about? Or would be better that more information and more expression was available, but to a smaller audience which is probably the relevant audience for any person? So, there are a lot of decisions like that, that are getting made and a lot of them are gut level.
So i mean, we tried to be as academic about this possible in trying to think rigorously through the different results that we'll get if we go to different directions. But a lot of it is just like you define your objectives, what you're going for. In this case, to optimize for the best of the whole community and the whole user base and over the long term, and that's important too, long term but short term. And then, you just kind of operate and do what you think will be best along that line.