i guess my concern with “weak ties” will make more sense after I’m finished proposing a new kind of functionality for the edgeryders site that would handle crowdsourced policy analysis. smhh. 
Im with Said on this point.
The work of online engagement is hard enough without technically raising the barrier to entry.
Not about privacy
As for the post-privacy discussion, Snowden today confirmed that “[e]ncryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.” [source]. The Facebook issue is not about privacy though (as everything on a corporate website should be considered quasi-public content anyway). It’s about their evil corporate walled garden philosophy that has wrecked the Web as it was in 2004 (with so many people blogging and all).
Can we settle for Twitter signup maybe? Twitter content is nearly always publicly visible, so I regard them similarly to a blog hoster like WordPress (minus the open source, but I still like them like I did like Google back in 2004). Twitter signup would save users the e-mail and account verification and name & photo setup steps, and that’s quite a lot. Users would still get a page to enter more details if they want. Also we’d add StatusNet signup at the same time as a concession to our open source folks. But Facebook signup … I can’t take sites seriously when they offer it 
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plus, Twitter stood up to the NSA as far as we know. which is pretty cool.
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and as a marketer, I could see myself promoting awarness of this experiment to other internet studies people who are very interested in such questions.
Why not?
Go ahead! We might all learn something by comparing notes.
re: Excellent point
and it would be sad if this was framed as you are for/against Facebook. I personally hate Facebook. and yet I use it 20 out of 24 hours of the day. but just imagine what it will be like when EdgeRyders is looking to harness the power of crowdfunding and we need to essentially roll out the red carpet for these new eyeballs, no? also, on a not so unrelated note, is it necessary to fill out a subject field when replying to a reply? 