From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/04/facebook-socialnetworking
Can you imagine life without Facebook? Probably. But you can’t deny the phenomenal growth of the site since it was opened beyond US colleges in September 2006. Even in internet years, those five years have proved remarkably successful.
Facebook overtook MySpace as the UK’s most popular social network in the UK in autumn last year. The comparison between the two is not exactly equal, with MySpace attracting a younger, more music-orientated crowd and with a design that had started to look increasingly cluttered and disorganised next to Facebook’s clinical organisation.
What Facebook was better at doing was firstly structuring social communication in a more efficient way, but also provided a format that proved more attractive and accessible to a more mainstream audience, hence the rapid ascent of the site.
Why all the Facebook chatter?
Its ubiquity among a particular class and demographic explains much of the attention it has had in the media; most of the people in the media are the right age and demographic to use it, rather than MySpace or Bebo. But go to any playground in the UK and those kids will only be talking about Bebo. They think Facebook is stuffy and boring, but it’s no bad thing for Facebook’s economics that it attracts a more lucrative userbase.
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the social graph, or mapping our relationships in digital form, is enticing, but not a vision that Facebook could ever wholly fulfill. Already, the notion of a single destination website that contains the bulk of our social interactions seems outdated. Would Facebook ever relinquish enough control over those social transactions to facilitate communication outside the site? It might have to, if it wants to stay relevant.
Already the flexibility and openness of Twitter – despite its obvious lack of a business model so far – has shown that handing over control of interaction has huge advantages in building an audience of people that want to use your service in the way that works for them.
