The web 2.0 site I’m most addicted to
3rd May, 2007Facebook, the social networking website, has to be about the most addictive website I’ve found yet — and I’m not alone: boasting 25 million members worldwide1, it recently won a People’s Voice Webby in the social networking category.
For the uninitiated, Facebook is a lot like Friends Reunited but — how can I put this? — better.
Originally developed for university students, it does everything you might expect: you create profiles, list interests, share news, upload photos, join groups and networks. So far, so passé.
But there’s more…
- Upon signing up, Facebook offers to poll your Gmail (or any webmail) address book and search its database for users signed up with a corresponding email address. This means I had 20 or so friends within about the first minute.
- it has a Firefox toolbar which I find I’m actually using…
- the toolbar gives me a Facebook sidebar where I can see all my friends’ “status” in real-time
- Status? — Facebook has a number of ways of keeping contact with friends: messages via inboxes, notes, one-liners on your “wall” but the quickest and easiest way to publicise what you’re up to is to update your status, in a feature reminiscent of Twitter.
- Status updates are ephemeral, one-liners ranging in nature from “David is gutted about the football” through “Claire is looking forward to her holiday but not the M25″ to “Pete is sinking his teeth into juicy melons with relish”
- All this, and photos too! According to wikipedia, Facebook is the preferred choice for photo sharing (ahead of Flickr) with 6 million photos upload per day.
In short, I feel like I know many of my friends better than I ever have done; I certainly feel ‘more connected‘ with, rather than without, Facebook… making it the first truly useful social networking website I’ve found — and undoubtedly the most addictive.
All of this said, I have some misgivings about Facebook: its usability is poor, its design uninspiring and the inherent privacy issues will always deter some. I might save a more detailed evaluation of its shortcomings for another post.
In the meantime, anyone out there used Facebook?
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May 3rd, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Facebook is really cool. I’m glad someone finally pointed out this great online community. Once I saw that they also had a firefox tool bar plugin I was sold. Great post keep up the good work. Aloha from Maui, Hawaii http://www.alohatechsupport.net
May 4th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Facebook is social, I’ll give it that, but I do find it slightly lacking and restrictive.
It doesn’t really have a purpose, but the introduction of “gift” to friends is a novel way to create a rating system.
I think it is a good combination of technologies (Photo tagging, whiteboarding, Microblogging) and could (possibly) be used cleanly as a Educational tools.
But doesn’t Elgg do similar things?
May 4th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Social networks have certainly caught the attention of the 16-19 years at College. If its not MySpace, Bebo or Facebook then its smaller, more specific sites. Whether its facilitation IT usage of distracting students away from what they should be doing is as yet unclear. Also, didnt either the BBC or the Guardian write about Universities writing MySpace pages? And then there Ning…. creating your own Network (Thanks Doug Belshaw).
May 21st, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Are you still addicted to it? I find it pale inn comparison to MySpace and of course, we all know MySpace sucks.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Fair question, and yeah I confess the novelty has worn off a little. It’s probably about time I did my follow-up post… next few days. Promise.