So, here it is 3 months later, and I am still going strong. The facts:
- I am on Facebook 3 times a day or more
- I read the status updates every time I log in
- I update my status feed 1-3 times a day
- I have (somehow) 700 friends (!)
- I receive 1-5 emails on FB a day-and 1-5 friend invites
So what do I think?
Facebook support community. The site does a good job supporting my notions of tribes, or kieretsu, , the idea of people--and companies who share certain connections/links/affinities supporting obne another. Since I see myself as part of a free-floating crowd of a couple of thousand people with similar and/or compatible interest/beliefs/ties, the FB friending application is a great way both to friend and connect with people and to have easyaccess to them. S(ame for LinkedIn in a more formal sense.)
Facebook is also fun. The variety of information is entertaining. Kris Krug and Cory Dennis post videos, Joel Postman is clever, a whole host of old friends and distant acquaintances allow me to peek into their lives and I get to see aspects of people I work with that humanize a big company and teach me about who they are.
Facebook will be passed over in time. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, FB is just another social network (YASN). Even though it is the best one at the moment, it strikes me that just as eBay and Amazon taught us all about ecommerce and storing private info securely online, FB is teaching us how to share publicly--and yet, as soon as the technology develops that allow us to share anywhere we are--rather than have to log into a web site to do so--we are all gone from this place. (Yes, I am talking again about structured and unstructured data, Open ID, FOAF and more sophisticated sorts of widgets and badges that can dis aggregate community and treat it as another for of data (MY FB status feed anywhere, for example..mixed with your Twitter stream.)
Meanwhile, it's fun, and a helluva of laboratory.
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