After several years of trying in vain to ignore the Facebook phenomenon, I’ve finally given in and created a profile. Way to go early adopter! After having done the LiveJournal thing for years, and experimenting with Friendster and Orkut and every other new social network that emerged, finally came to the same conclusion pretty much everyone else did – after the thrill of each new SN wore off, it started to feel like there was no there there, and the whole pursuit started to seem pointless. Not to mention the time suck. But I’ve got to admit that Facebook is a different kind of beast. The UI is incredibly clean, the API is wide open and there’s a thriving ecosystem of interesting plugins and custom widgets going on. And it seems to have a staying power the others didn’t have. No guarantees I’ll remain active there, but enjoying playing with it for now, and have already hooked up with an old high school friend I hadn’t talked to for years (classic story, eh?)
Just installed the WordBook plugin for WordPress, which installs a WordPress importer into your Facebook profile. Didn’t seem to pick up any existing posts; let’s see whether it picks up new ones. [Later: Ah yep, creating a new post caused the FB profile to pick up the last 10 or so from Birdhouse – nifty.]
But … you can’t do anything there unless you sign up. Why would I sign up unless I’m reasonably sure there are enough people using it that interest me?
LinkedIn gets this (closer to) right, IMO.
That’s a classic chicken/egg problem, but with Facebook, I think you can be reasonably sure you’ll find 5x more people using it than you think you will (at least that’s what I’m finding). I had thought of it as a teenybopper thing, but and it is in comparison to LinkedIn (which I also use), it’s definitely got a larger grown-up audience than I would have expected.
I put some serious thought about signing up with Facebook after a plug in Wired mag. It has what looks to be all the ingredients to make a useful social networking site. I believe the average facebook user is now around age 35, so it certainly caters to people in my age group, than somewhere like Rupert Murdoch’s Myspace (R). The thing that bothers me with Facebook, as with others, is it is a centralized server system, owned by a company who may decide at some point to change data usage and privacy agreements in order to capitalize on the information it “owns”.
A possible alternative could be Noserub, which is opensource and can be hosted on your own server.
http://noserub.com/
Oddly enough, I’ve come to the same conclusion recently myself. Nice to know that there are a sufficient number of (hopefully interesting) adults out there vs. it being a teeny-bopper thing…
Plus, don’t forget, it has zombies and vampires.
Seriously though, I was skeptical of Facebook at first (especially after struggling for months with the by-comparison neanderthal Myspace), but it’s been a revelation. I’m continually surprised by some of the the old friends who add me on Facebook – people who refuse to communicate by email, luddites who until now would scarcely ever enter a room with a computer in it, Facebook has caught the popular imagination in a way that Myspace only ever dreamed of.