Why all the fuss about Facebook?
Posted 19 June 2007 at 8:38AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online
You can't have missed the fuss about Facebook lately. Launched in 2004, it was a restricted service for US college and high school pupils until late 2006, when the doors were finally opened to anyone with a valid email address. In the last couple of months, and it's hard to remember exactly why, it became the must-join website for anyone in the online business, or with an interest in the social networking thing.
Data published by The Guardian last month put Facebook's membership - in the UK alone - at over 3.5 million. Its current global growth rate is 3% per week, or to put it another way, about a million new members each week. It entered the UK's top 20 websites in April, and is still rising, if the media coverage is anything to go by. As a snapshot: there's a group on Facebook for BBC staff. You have to have a BBC email address to join it. As I write this, it has nearly 13,000 members - that's just over half the BBC's entire workforce.
So what exactly is Facebook? It's a social network website, aimed at a slightly older audience, with the emphasis strongly on the social aspect. It has a 'notes' feature, basically a back-to-basics blog. It has a 'photo library' feature, which isn't really a patch on Flickr, but does the job. It has a 'marketplace' which doesn't yet have eBay worried.
But what it does excel in its the social side: at every step, you're encouraged to connect with your Facebook 'friends'. Perhaps the best illustration is that, when you upload a photo, you're specifically invited to 'tag' the people in the photo, rather than adding keywords to describe the subject. Over time, I suspect the 'event' function, which lets you invite your friends to real-world social gatherings, might prove to be the most powerful of all.
The core of the Facebook experience is the 'news feed' which greets you when you log in. It's basically a one-line record of everything your friends have done on the site in the last couple of days. Every time one of them changes their personal profile, or uploads a photo, or joins a Facebook group, or connects with a new friend, you see a short notification. Most fun of all, perhaps, are the 'status updates', where users complete the sentence 'Fred Bloggs is...' in whatever way they see fit. It could be where they are, what they're doing, what they're thinking - and it can be furiously addictive.
So what makes Facebook so successful? It's partly demographics: Facebook has done a great job of capturing those (like me!) who feel too old to wade into the garish chaos of MySpace. It's much more welcoming than, say, a conventional blogging application: the first thing you see is a list of your friends - real names this time, not silly aliases. But perhaps most crucially of all, it takes minimal effort to get involved. Your news feed writes itself; and when you are invited to contribute real content, it's usually only a few lines. Status updates, for example, are rarely more than a few words, certainly fewer than a text message. This is blogging for people who have neither the time nor the inclination.
The opportunities for business use aren't as obvious as, say, the blank canvas of a blogging application. But if (as with many entrepreneurs and small businesses) there's a fine line between your friends and your business contacts, Facebook could have a role to play.
Tags: blogging, facebook, myspace, social networking
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