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Facebook has come out of nowhere to be the current ‘darling’ application of the Web2.0 world.
For those of you (including me!) who have been astonished by Facebook’s growth and popularity, allow me to give a bit of an insight into what, why and therefore how it can be of value to we business communicators.
Background : Facebook Vs MySpace : Work Vs non-work profiles : Popularity of Facebook : Uses of Facebook : Worrying – copyright issues : Facebook tools : How many networks do I need to belong to? : Conclusion
Facebook has been around since early 2004, but was principally designed for college and university students; only recently has it opened its doors to anyone with an email address.
Facebook is the latest ‘big player’ in a trend that started with sites like Friendster and ’came of age’ with MySpace — a place for building up online social networks of like-minded individuals. If they subsequently met offline, so be it, but that wasn’t the real purpose.
As I have written previously, the advent of places like MySpace gave teenagers a tremendous opportunity to ‘try on’ different personalities in order to find one that best fits them. As parent-of-teenager Michelle Slatalla wrote yesterday (15th June 2007) in the Brisbane Times,
“What Facebook’s younger users really are doing is exploring their identities, which they may not want to parade in front of their parents.
“Can’t I explore my identity, too?” I asked. “Why does everything fun have to be for them?”
Of course, there is a ‘downside’ to being on the same social network as one’s children, as Michelle points out. According to her daughter,
“You won’t get away with this,” she typed. “everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks.”
As indeed they do when their parents spy on their MySpace pages.
But what of MySpace — why the seeming demise of it in comparison to Facebook? Chris Pirillo (a very famous blogger and publisher) prefers Facebook to MySpace because (as anyone can attest) MySpace has some of the worst page designs in the entire known universe, whereas Facebook’s interface is nice and clean, although, like a blog, it can quickly become cluttered with the latest ‘this and that’ applications — calendar, question, twitter interface, inter alia.
Here’s a video of Chris on ‘MySpace versus Facebook’:
http://live.pirillo.com/ / http://chris.pirillo.com/media/
As Chris points out, MySpace has become a ’spam farm’; whether Facebook’s developers are able to save their baby from the same fate remains to be seen. MySpace won’t disappear, because it has a huge community already on it; perhaps new entrants to this social media space will prefer the tidy interface of Facebook to the disorganised mayhem of MySpace. But with a rapid growth in the number of applications and plug-ins that are available for it, Facebook risks becoming complicated, ’noisy’ and distracting, much like MySpace. TechCrunch even has an article on this, and Jeff Clavier recently tweeted about it, too.
Back in January, MDBlogger recently listed the differences between MySpace and Facebook. Bearing in mind that Facebook still wasn’t open to the public at that stage, the points MDBlogger makes are interesting and certainly the comments reflect the ‘clean versus cluttered’ approaches of Facebook and MySpace.
Those who are interested in the different business models of MySpace and Facebook may be interested to read this report of a ‘game’ held at the LSE in which students had to analyse the business models of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Second Life.
A brilliant spoof ad of the famous ‘Apple Vs Microsoft’ series of ads recently surfaced — ‘Facebook Vs MySpace’ — which for me explains the difference between the two, the age demographics. According to Brandee Barker, a Facebook spokeswoman:
“But I can say that more than 50 per cent of Facebook users are outside of college now. As our original demographic gets older, we want to be able to include their social networks.”
Which raises the question of ‘when does one’s private social network(s) interfere with one’s work social network’?
As Mark Darby reports, his Facebook identity is now mentioned at work. At a recent meeting the most senior person (‘MSP’) present said to him,
“Ah, Mr Darby – disappointed not to see you in superhero mode.”
The meaning of which is that the MSP had visited Mark’s Facebook page. As Mark laments,
“But it does beg the question (and apologies if someone else has already discussed this) – is it wrong to not be ‘yourself’ on what is a social network, because of implications for work.
“My friends are most disappointed – they feel I have become a faceless corporate monkey.”
As Claudia Whitcomb comments on Mark’s post, perhaps the best option would be to create a Doppelganger — one profile for personal stuff and one for the work place. Never the two shall meet. Especially as employers routinely scour Google for information about prospective employees. Today’s first and second jobbers are finding their MySpace pages full of photos of drunken debauchery and lament(able) poetry not overly helpful in being taken seriously.
Certainly these days privacy is almost non-existent; one needs to manage one’s online presence as carefully as one would manage one’s small children around an aged, dowager aunt.
But there is no denying the popularity of Facebook.
Canada’s Times Colonist recently reported that Canadians had recently discovered a new passion — ‘Facebooking‘. Says columnist Kelly Roesler,
“Along with hockey and Tim Horton’s coffee, Canadians have evidently discovered a new national passion: Facebooking.
“Canada has embraced the social networking website wholeheartedly, with nearly three million users logging into Facebook — more than half of them daily. Canada has the greatest number of Facebook users outside of the U.S.
“Toronto is the largest regional network in the world with its 637,956 members.”
Apparently the UK is also seeing explosive growth, according to Roesler.
Similarly, Facebook has exploded in South Africa; according to News24.com,
“South Africans have embraced the internet social networking revolution, with over 50 000 new users signing on to the local Facebook network. The Facebook “South Africa” network currently has over 87 000 members – up from 35 000 in May.”
As I type this there are 91,458 Australians (or at least those who would wish to be known as ‘Australians’), which isn’t bad and places us fifth in the number of countries who have embraced Facebook (see below).
According to Wikipedia, as of February 2007 Facebook hosts 20 million users, receives over 30,000,000,000 page views per month, is ranked 16th in the world for traffic, and on March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of American youths in the United States discovered Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than males (56%).[104]
According to Duncan McLeod in an article dated 14th June,
“Today that figure is 25m [users], with more than 100 000 new members joining daily. Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked website in the US, with more than 40bn page views a month. It operates the number one photo-sharing application on the Web, with 1.8bn photos stored on its servers. Facebook is also one of the world’s “stickiest” websites, with people spending an average of 20 minutes on the site daily. More than half of the active users log on every day.
“Interestingly, SA [South Africa] has taken to Facebook more than most nations. Despite a relatively low penetration of Internet users, SA is sixth in the Facebook universe, after the US, Canada, the UK, Norway and Australia, based on the number of registered users.”
Exactly the same as MySpace, Facebook allows people to communicate easily with their friends and associates using the Web. Users regularly update their profiles, post photographs, share their thoughts, arrange parties and join interest groups and other social networks. The system shows which users have mutual friends. It can even let others know what music you’re listening to, if you add that particular plug-in.
But that is not to say that the whole MySpace/Facebook genre is without its critics. Steven L. Streight is a very strong opponent of such sites, calling Facebook ‘just another crummy dating hook up site’ in private correspondence to me.
Unlike another Web2.0 ‘darling’, Second Life, Facebook has restrictive copyright issues. According to its FAQs it lets you keep the copyright ownership of your own material. In answer to the question “Do I retain the copyright and other legal rights to my content?“:
Yes. You retain the copyright to your content. When you upload your content you grant us a license to use and display your content. For more information please visit our Terms of Use, which contain a link to our Copyright Policy and other important information about your privileges and responsibilities as a Facebook user.
However, its Terms and Conditions paint a different story:
When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Key ’scare’ phrases for me here are: “you automatically grant”, “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose”. Something to be mindful of.
Dan York has an interesting review of a Firefox toolbar add-in for Facebook, commenting that
“I haven’t really used the “search Facebook” feature, but I definitely do like the notifications that appear telling you how many messages or friend requests you have.”
The ability to see what your network’s calendars are like is also useful, particularly in a work-group network or dinner or movie-outing network, but of course that very much depends on you keeping your calendar up to date, they keeping their calendars up to date and you all actually installing the calendar plug-in to your profiles. But there’s no reason why you would choose Facebook’s calendar over Google’s if you already have google’s calendar set up. And I love Google’s document-sharing and editing facility and wonder if Facebook will eventually try to mimic it.
How many networks do I need to belong to?
“Crickey, there’s a million networking sites already (LinkedIn, MyRagan, Communicators’ Network just for our PR/BusComms niche industry alone), do I really need to belong to another?”
Fair question… add in specialist sites like the IABC’s and PRSA’s and you really could spend your whole time juggling your network updates, let alone doing any actual work (you know, those annoying interruptions to your day that are what you get paid for).
Hopefully sites like the newly-launched MyLifeBrand will become the one-stop portal for all of the various networking sites we belong to (or should do if we are to keep abreast of our industry and our profession). According to Daniel Scalisi, EVP of MyLifeBrand, it isn’t another social network, but rather a social platform which enables people to aggregate and better manage their favorite social networks and services, as well as enabling communities to develop a fully branded relevant community.
I’ve very kindly been sent an invitation from the folks at MyLifeBrand to set up an account and join in the fun, but so far I’ve not made the time to do it — those annoying interruptions called work and a PhD have gotten in the way — but no doubt I will shortly. It will be great if MyLifeBrand allows you to nominate and aggregate your own choices of social networking sites into your profile, but perhaps that is still a little way off for a service that is still proudly in ‘Alpha’ state.
But until MyLifeBrand or similar aggregators allow us to ‘pick and choose’ our own sites, then ‘yes’ we do have to jump from one site to another. I have found that opening up a whole lot of tabs in Firefox (it also works in IE), visiting each site that I want to keep a close eye on in each tab and then going to ‘Tools, Options’ and setting the Home Page to be the pages currently displayed is brilliant. Every time I then open up Firefox (and so to IE — I run different uni and gmail email accounts in each and can stay logged in to all of them) I have all of my preferred sites there for me.
And of course there is Twitter: a brilliant way of keeping in touch and as Living Light Bulbs and JJProjects (thanks to Joe Jaffe for the links) point out, comes with a plethora of uses. At least there is a plug-in for Facebook-Twitter integration.
For the final say on whether Facebook is useful or not, I turn to Dan Hill of the Flying Aqua Badgers (don’t ask! {grin}) and his post ‘Facebook is Disturbingly Impressive‘:
“Over the past week I’ve had a couple of invites to see what Facebook is all about. Last night I took it up. I thought MySpace had it going on with social connections but this is something else. Within a few clicks I’m seeing great long lists of the folks I went to school with and details of who is still friends with who.
On top of that I can also see how those relationships bleed in with working life. It is commonly said that Andover is a small town and everyone knows everyone within a couple of degrees of separation. The written proof is there for all to see.”
Until then, my advice would be to join it, see how you get on, but don’t expend a lot of effort on it.
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101 ways to power-up your writing.
