Panthro - 12:05 am on Jul 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

Seems to me this article should be more about one business' success than anything else AND an explanation that people use the internet for entertainment. The Facebook website was a great idea and it's no wonder it's having such incredible growth. People want to interact with each other and have fun and doing so online was restricted before to fractures of websites - with forums being the best option for interaction imo. Myspace was getting there but that ship just wasn't steered by the right people to pull it off. It takes a lot of money and a brilliant strategy to get one website to appeal to so many people that are parts of so many different cultures all over the world and to be the go-to all in one for entertainment. So far, Facebook has been able to do that to a large degree. Co-marketing with Twitter, and creating buzz words like "social media" and articles like this have all been an important part of that.

The way people use the internet and the way they are marketed to on the internet are always evolving and the Facebook option for personal interaction (which I include in the Entertainment category) has been an important development . There is only so much time in a day and people only have so much time available to screw around. More and more people now know that you can go to Facebook.com and get that fix.


Just my .02


And I don't really like "studies" that take one small metric, like 1 year of U.S. internet use and make too broad of a claim. I bet a lot of that can be attributed to entertainment and the "fix" Facebook provides.

And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users

How is a "social network" defined? It seems to me most people think of Facebook, Twitter, and one of the other little badges they've seen on a website as a "social network", but I wonder what this particular metric includes.

I love the first chart with the big title "Why Media Companies Must Embrace Facebook". Sounds like Senator Palpatine's relentless calls to Young Skywalker lol.