The Facebook Age

Come network with me ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I probably don’t have to tell anyone what Facebook.com is – it’s the phenomenally successful and hip social networking site that’s handily bypassed MySpace as the place to hang your on-line profile. Facebook is the brainchild of Harvard grad Mark Zuckerberg who was all of 20 years old when he launched his famous app from a dormitory room in 2004.

Zuckerberg is from an affluent family – he attended Philips Exeter Academy prior to Harvard. It was at Philips Academy where he picked up the idea of a “Face Book”. Philips maintained a printed directory with students’ faces and short profiles called a Face Book. Zuckerberg carried the idea considerably further with his on-line version for Harvard. He was hardly twiddling his thumbs prior to Facebook; at @ 17 he created “Synapse” – a music listening precursor to Pandora that memorized the listener’s musical tastes. Microsoft and AOL made bids to purchase Synapse and hire Zuckerberg to develop the app, but he chose Harvard instead.

The success of Facebook was so widespread and intense that Zuckerberg dropped out of college in his sophomore year. He now heads up Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, and has a net worth in excess of 4 billion dollars. The networking app has 400 million users and gets more than a 100 million hits a day. Microsoft did purchase a 1.6% stake in Facebook, for $240 million. This was after they outbid Google Inc. which was also wooing Facebook.

What makes Facebook so special? To be frank and up-front, it’s probably not all that special. Explaining the popularity of web sites is similar to doing the same for drinking establishments or turtle neck sweaters. One variation will languish while the other one takes the world by storm. The scientific merits of one over the other matter very little. Facebook is a very effective hyper-networking tool, where conversations in different social circles overlap. Circles widen as people look at friends’ friends and add them as their own. Due to its powerful connectedness, Facebook is not good as a “hookup” site or dating service. Rude, lewd remarks could easily make the rounds and come back to haunt the sender. To look up old cronies, friends and family members, Facebook is excellent. Facebook has also woven in a few games (Farms and farm animals) and gimmicks (“pokes”) to provide an all-encompassing experience (although I have to say I’m annoyed by farm animals).

In the early 1990’s, it was thought that the OS was the most important factor in a customer’s on-line experience. Then the theater of war became browsers – Netscape versus IE versus Opera versus Firefox. In the 2010’s, “uber-apps” have become the battleground – things like Google’s search engine, iTunes music store and Facebook. (Take note-- Microsoft has no stake or a small stake in any of these).

Alas, my middle-aged take on Facebook doesn’t vary that far from my take on AOL chat when I wrote about that (“Games People Play” Feb 2005). My main critique then was that people tend to lie or exaggerate on profiles (big news! :-)). I’ve since noticed that even the most honest self-appraisals and recent photos fail to capture essential details – you must meet the person in person. And if you want anything but a most superficial “hookup”, you probably need to exchange a lot of emails. You can invest all this effort on what pans out to be a wrong prospect. Personally, I have better ways to spend my time.

I will say that Facebook offers a powerful network reach that brings many people to this particular gateway. Will it be “the one” for all time? It probably won’t even be that for 10 months – I’m amazed at the extreme fickleness of the computer crowd. MySpace is still licking its wounds, as the lover scorned. In conclusion, I’m enjoying Facebook for now and now is all that matters ( according to Sanskrit poetry which I don’t have with me to quote). Which all reminds me, I need to check Facebook and see if I’ve been poked.

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