I have been spending a lot of time on Facebook these past couple of months and believe that it is really a game changing way of interacting online. While Facebook has been serving the “C” generation (a term Peter Friedman, Liveworld’s CEO uses to describe the Community-Connected group of people born after 1975), I believe that Facebook––or another social network with facebook’s features and characteristics––will become a must-have piece of the professional knowledge worker’s basket of tools.

So what is it about facebook that makes it so compelling and useful? Why has it attracted 40 million users?

Facebook works because it was built – for starters – from the outside in. It was designed to serve the specific needs of an offline community. Because of its provenance as the online platform for Harvard students, it was crafted to serve very specific needs of how small connected groups of people interact.

And rather than being one size fits all, Facebook was designed to serve large numbers of micro-communities. The only thing you see inside facebook is what is going on inside your community of “friends.” Nothing feels extraneous. The people in my network matter to me and so what they are doing also matters. I don’t really care about the larger universe and inside facebook I am not exposed to it.

Facebook has a few critical features that have enabled it to serve the needs of a very large number of people.

First it is organized around networks. I am only a part of the Boston network, which I don’t really use. But I can imagine being actively involved in any workplace or college networks within facebook.

The next critical feature for me is the news-feed/mini-feed system. When I log into my facebook home page, I have an complete feed of all of the activity in among my collection of friends. So I can see things like which groups people have joined, which applications they have added, which events they are attending. I can also go to the home page of one of my friends and see a consolidated view of their activities. This is really at the heart of the facebook experience and is why I use facebook so extensively. I maintain a fairly large network of professional “friends” and it takes me almost no time and effort to keep up with what they are doing.

Facebook also enables the formation of groups with very flexible administration. Anyone can start a group. And groups that offer value grow extremely quickly. Groups are very tactical. And because they are so easy to form they can be used and then discarded. I am a member of a number of groups but I tend not to participate in them because they are not directly linked into my news feeds.

Facebook is completely integrated with your phone. I’m not a “texter” but I can see how using your phone as your interface could be very useful.

Finally Facebook has opened its API to third party applications. The Application Programming Interface allows third party apps to talk to Facebook. There are over 4,000 new applications on facebook now. I am using the iphoto/facebook integration tool which allows me to publish my photos from iPhoto directly to my facebook page.

While the initial applications that have been written to facebook are very much oriented to the consumer and for personal use, I imagine that there are applications in the pipeline geared to professionals. We are working on one for Swift our new platform for bringing conferences onto the Internet.

In my research on facebook I came across this very astute analysis by Peter Brantley at O’Reilly who says:

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established - the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication - these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.

So I want to throw this out for discussion. Are you using Facebook? Do you agree with my analysis of its success? Do you believe it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3?

Share This

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.