The Book of Ashes

Facebook 9:21AM

Its a fascinating company and watching The Social Network makes it even more so.

Some quick stats:
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

I was talking to a friend the other day (an older guy) who thought that Facebook was a fad and would fade and that people would use it less and less. I think theres a couple of key points to consider here:

- 500 million people and growing, its not loosing people!
- Its almost impossible to beat them at their own game, you can create a better website (people have done it) but who will use it? It only works if all your friends and all their friends, etc, etc, move across, otherwise you move across and a couple of your friends then get frustrated at the lack of status updates.
- Facebook can change/copy other inovations fast enough to adapt to any incremental improvement.
- They are now Googles biggest competition/threat.

I think they're here to stay and I think they'll adapt by changing features to keep people interested. A couple of things that people don't really realise. Facebook is now an advertising medium and that doesn't just apply to businesses. You'll notice that some people are more active/promenient than others on Facebook. Effectively they're advertising themselves, more exposure, people know more about what they're up to. This is a little like the popular kid at school, so long as they're not posting rubbish, they move up in people's perception. I would wager that these people are then thought of first when inviting people to parties, etc. So by managing your posts carefully (regular, interesting posts) you can wage a PR campaign amoungst your friends :)

For businesses, Facebook is fantastic, you create a "page" for your business and gather "likes" for it to become official. You can advertise by posting on your wall or others walls and a link to it appears on all your friends streams. Viral advertising, all free. Its great and works well. Most businesses have some Facebook component now and there are other features such as embedding on your site who "likes" your Facebook page.

Privacy, argueably Facebooks greatest weakness, or the lack of, its greatest asset (as who hasn't looked through photos of friends of friends who you've never met before). It definitely played a part in Facebooks initial (and explosive) growth, but once settled in pepole usually want finer control and have to settle with what they've got. The privacy in Facebook is crap, the settings keep changing, you're often not informed and the default settings are usually for relaxed privacy. A lot of information is given away/shared without people really realising it.

Two examples:

1. The Chat Window.
Click on this and you see who amoungst your friends are currently online and available for chat. Sit and monitor this all day and you can record all your friends log in and log out times. Or you can write a script to do this for you. I did this the other day (because I can). At first I thought it would take an hour or two. Admitidly was a little more complicated and ended up taking about 4 hours but once done it faithfully polled the chat window every 10 secs and recorded peoples log in/log out times. So your friends can monitor how much time you spend on Facebook if they want.

2. Friends.
So I can click on a friend and see all their friends. I can then click on another friend and possibly see all their friends. I could manually build up a network of millions of friends linked to friends via this method. Or I could once again write a little app to automate this and gather data from Facebook. I believe you could reproduce a not insignificant part of their friend network via this way. Obviously only their names, not email addresses but you could also strip any other info you could find on the page such as images, interests, etc, anything publically available.

So if I was Google...
(who want, and have tried, to create a competing social network and have failed). I would create a new Social Network site, take Facebooks best features (status updates, pages, likes, etc, etc) and improve upon its worst features (privacy, transparency, etc) then as mentioned above, this wouldn't take off as you need to move everyone across. So I'd write some little apps to strip friends/photos/comments, etc from Facebook and import them into your system. You could have a hybrid that logged into your system and Facebook, stripped recent comments from the Facebook page, linked them to your friends (that you'd previously stripped from Facebook) and add them on your page, do this until all your friends are using the new system.

So currently just an idea, it is missing a few key points, such as you can't get the users email addresses across. Still it has some potential. Would be great to see someone do it :)

Right, time to go update my Facebook status!