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>> I know this doesn't belong in the foo much, but I wanted to get as much views as possible.
>> I used facebook for the first time only 10 days back. :)
[edited by: King_Fisher at 6:51 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2007]
the desire to see and be seen!
If that were the case then Friendster would still be huge and MySpace wouldn't be dropping behind.
What facebook does better than these two (and other social networks) is:
a) Saves you time. It tells you on your own homepage what your friends have been doing without your even having to visit your friends' profiles or have them send you a message to find out. Orkut has learned from this and has implemented its own (inferior) facebook-style newsfeed.
b) facebook tries hard to bring together people who already know each other anyway. MySpace, by contrast, tries to introduce people who don't know each other. (Not surprising, given the MySpace demographic). People spend more time procrastinating on facebook because they are communicating with people they actually know rather than a bunch of random strangers.
c) I don't know if I'm typical but I find myself using facebook for a lot of communications with friends where previously I would have used email. I never used myspace in the same way. In this way facebook has become a practical tool, rather than simply another distraction.
1. what do you think is the secret of social networking sites' success?
2. what do you think is the secret of Facebook's success?
At a guess*:
1. It's one more thing people can do now that they couldn't do so well a few months ago; like buses, there'll be another development along in a minute; likely on a different domain.
2. Fad + "I'm too good for MySpace**". And there'll 100% certainly be another one along soon, almost certainly on a different domain.
Please Note:
* I've never been there
** I've never been there either
He's a fan, saying "at the moment, Facebook is the site that, in my experience, comes closest to fulfilling the promise of social media."
Facebook’s stricter registration process has largely spared it from the spam and other commercial elements, which has made it popular.
Hirschorn notes Jason Kottke has suggested Facebook’s new strategy is intrinsically flawed. It is, Kottke argues, recapitulating the subscriber-era AOL’s failed strategy—often called its “walled garden” strategy—by making most Facebook pages inaccessible to Google search, and generally behaving like a large corporate intranet: in short, “AOL 2.0.”
“In competitive markets, open and messy trumps closed and controlled in the long run.”
Kottke also says:
Everything you can do on Facebook with ease is possible using a loose coalition of blogging software, IM clients, email, Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, etc. Sure, it’s not as automatic or easy, but anyone can participate and the number of things to see and do on the web outnumbers the number of things you can see and do on Facebook by several orders of magnitude (and always will).
Hirschorn says he is "sympathetic to this argument, having thought the same of MySpace, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s wrong." He goes on to explain in his article that:
Openness and messiness are indeed the characteristics that make the Web so different from other forms of media... But it has always been the push-me/pull-you between order and disorder that has made the Internet more than merely a vast agglomeration of stuff. Search engines, for starters, gave shape and order to this infinitude, while also transforming most everything else on the Web by forcing it to compete on a search-keyword basis....The iTunes system is further evidence that people do not always prefer infinite choice:....Facebook, likewise, is imposing the right limits—it’s almost New Victorian in that regard. It is a connection engine that successfully mirrors how most of us want to live our lives. (Most people live in suburbs for a reason.) If the overall trend on the Internet is the individual user’s loss of control as corporations make money off information you unwittingly provide, Facebook is offering a way to get some of that control back. In Facebook’s vision of the Web, you, the user, are in control of your persona. As BuzzMachine’s Jarvis has argued, you decide how much leg you want to show (literally or metaphorically, as the case may be), and to whom. And if this model comes to dominate, which is not impossible, it could force us to rethink our disdain for the “walled garden.” This walled garden is not just AOL 2.0, because the garden has a door, and you, the user, have the key....
But it's a fast-changing field, with hundreds of sites experimenting with thousands of new ideas; whichever one is 'right' now, may be elbowed out tomorrow, either by a new kid on the block, or new developments by rivals.
Just a year or two ago, todays choice and quality of 'social networking' was unimagined. And the success - survival, even - of the current players is a lot about their ability to update enough to keep recruiting and retaining, but not so much as to alienate current users.
In some markets, one site currently dominates; orkut in Brazil, for example - but will the inertia protect a site from mass migration to new 'cool' player? And will the social snobbery that characterizes facebook be enough to keep it ahead of the next mass market mover? We'll see.
Years ago I attended a magazine design class where the speaker stressed you could not look too different that the leading publications in your category. Even if you hated the look. If you were a second tier publication, your design should have some elements of the leaders.
So, we're looking at Facebook a little in that regard, too. It's "what is" right now. But, I personally like it.
dc
