Everything I Know About Anything

Facebook.

It had to come to this. How could a discussion of Web2.0 skip over the hands down best social networking site. Compared to its competitors, first Friendster, and now Myspace (among others), Facebook is the simplest, cleanest, most usable, and most secure of them all.

Facebook succeeded by building atop communities that already existed. Facebook built upon college communities, initially Harvard, but later all other Universities, and now the high school and corporate worlds as well. In addition Facebook has no pretentions to be a journal or an artistic expression. I'm looking at you Myspace. Profiles are not editable and so the layout of everyone's profile is the same. This is a GOOD thing. Myspace gives users the option to edit their profiles and most people edit them to be utterly unreadable and incomprehensible.

Personally, I check Facebook every day. It is quite addicting to randomly browse people's profiles and essentially keep tabs on what everyone else's life is like. But unlike Myspace, you can only browse the profiles of people at the same school as you and of your friends. There are also numerous options for restricting access to contact information to protect your privacy. This, in addition to the requirement of being affiliated with an organization does a good job of keeping the stalkers away.

Facebook ties in wonderfully to many of the concepts of Web2.0. It's appeal is ENTIRELY user created. Mark Zuckerberg has contributed no content to the site at all except for his personal profile. Facebook is merely a facilitator of information that is posted by individuals. This is a very democratic method of content creation. It is not top down, and not even bottom up, but instead bottom to bottom.

The first group of kids to use Facebook is now in the corporate world and from all reports are still using Facebook to communicate and keep in touch with old friends. With Facebook's latest expansion to Facebook Corporate it becomes apparent that they intend for it to be a lifelong thing. User's can now join multiple networks, so it would be conceivable to be in a high school network, a university network, another university network for graduate school, and a corporate network. In the future I can envision business deals being made or at least facilitated through Facebook. Executives could use Facebook to reconnect with members of their college alumni network or find common ground with executives at a partner or rival corporation.

Facebook really does have the potential to become a ubiquitous tool and facet of life.

posted by albert @ 9:55 PM