When Friendster launched almost five years ago, I jumped in with both feet. As did almost everyone else I knew it seemed. Within months of signing up I'd managed to reconnect with old friends from high school, college, summer camp, previous jobs, etc.
The issue with the site was that after signing up and assembling your friends there wasn't a whole lot else to do. You could send people messages but one-to-one messaging quickly migrated to email.
Of course, MySpace came to market in July of '03 and we all pretty much know the story from there.
But MySpace never caught on amongst my Friendster freinds. It was too much work. We were all too old. And while it seemed a great platform to market yourself, your band, your book, your film, etc. it wasn't really the clean, easy, personal, semi-private, connection to real-life friends that I was looking for.
One year later, Facebook came along. Facebook looked like it made good on the Friendster promise but it was limited to college students. Growth was explosive and we all know the story there too...
Last September Facebook opened up its doors to anyone with an email address to much sturm and drang and the objections of many active college users. At the time I was pretty skeptical that Facebook could make the leap as well. It seemed like the user-base had been well-defined as college students, and that letting in the unwashed masses ran a real risk of disturbing the delicate balance that is an online community.
Turns out I was wrong. Facebook isn't one community. It's a million communities, some big, some tiny. And more than anything Facebook is an extremely powerful tool-set (and even more powerful open API) for managing your communities and articulating your connections with other people.
I've been using the site for a few months now and am really impressed by the the web 2.0 openness of it all: I RSS my blog into the site, I RSS status updates out of it, I one-click import pictures from Flickr, I use a firefox plug-in to manage my friends. I'm also impressed by all of the privacy features and functionality - pretty much anything can be made private or public and there are tiers of whom you allow to see what.
I don't think I'm the only grown-up who's discovering this. I was a little uneasy at first signing up for a "college" site but the growth of non-collegiate users has been so great as to moot that concern. And I think other people in my demo/psycho-graphic are finding the same thing, if the exponential rate of Facebook invites I've been receiving these past few months is any indication.
Eric Eldon over at Venture Wire recently wrote a good post summing up some of Facebook's recent growth story:
Facebook is now at more than 20 million registered users, up from 7.5 million users last July, the company told me. (In coming months, Facebook told me, it will begin reporting the number of actual users, or those who have logged into the site in the previous 30 days.) As mentioned, it now has about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from 1 billion page views day last month, it told me. Finally, it has more than 1.3 billion photos on the site, more than the 1 billion last month.
The caveat here of course is that this game is constantly changing. UK social networking leader Bebo has been on a tear lately and is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Yahoo. Korean juggernaut Cyworld has come to storm the US. MySpace has launched video channels. Even Friendster is back on a roll (especially in Southeast Asia, where they all but own the social networking market...)
But for this snapshot in time and from a purely personal perspective (as is everything on this blog, of course) I'm making camp at Facebook for now. Come find me there and we can write on each other's walls.
"the objections of many active college users"
I'm flattered that you linked to my blog, and even more flattered that you thought of my as young enough to be an "active college user." :-) I'm actually in my 30s and was commenting on Facebook from the perspective of a marketer who worked with college students, but from the nice safe distance of a corporate campus.
Posted by: Kevin Briody | May 23, 2007 at 03:40 AM
how funny! well your voice seemed authentically collegiate to me, so i suppose you're the right guy to me marketing to that demo! :-)
Posted by: Greg Clayman | May 23, 2007 at 04:17 AM