I’ve been amazed at how quickly Facebook has taken off with my core friend group in Seattle. Out of all the people my wife and I routinely interact with there are only 2 that aren’t “facebooking”. Watching the non-technical members of the group I think it comes down to a combination of factors. There isn’t one that sticks out.
- It is less demanding than a blog. A blog is great for modern article publishing, but it would create too much pressure on the sort of friends and family types that just want to occasionally keep everyone in the loop about what’s going on in their lives. Sort of like how you might never call all your relatives, but you send them all family Christmas cards. Most other online communites make you focus on entering paragraphs of text.
- They figured out how to make the internet look social without critical mass. With forums you really need a lot of people there to make them look active. This is partially because of the first point I raised comparing profile alerts to blogging or forums. All you have to do to create a new message is say “I’m at the movies” or “I like Pearl Jam”. Then the “wall to wall” stuff is like your mini public forum. But you only need 5-6 people in a circle before it starts to feel active daily. I’d wager you need at least 40 people in a forum before it feels this way.
- I don’t need to know what RSS is. Dare explains this one perfectly in his post here about “Why Facebook is Bigger than Blogging”.
- They walk you in one step at a time. Facebook also walks you through one step at a time to pull you in. If you have’t entered educational history it will put that front and center next time you sign in with a message that says “enter this… connect with classmates”… then you do it. You get to see the cause and effect of your actions. And they use just the right amount of Ajax in their interface. There is always a “next step” that keeps sucking you in. The question is whether or not they can keep it up. I’m sure this is a big reason why they opened it up… to keep the next steps coming.
- Text Messaging Interaction. Not all of my friends have internet enabled phones, but they do text message. And they love getting facebook updates on their phone and sending them. If you haven’t tried it yet, sign up for some mobile alerts from facebook. The way they do it is slick. You’ll need to increase your texting plan though.
- The photo sharing rocks. If you haven’t gone through the process try uploading some pictures to facebook that have some of your facebook friends in them. It’s very easy to caption every shot then click on faces and tag your friends. Then all those friends get notifications that you uploaded pictures of them and you get comments on the pictures. It’s really the ultimate social photoblogging software as far as I can tell.
- Searching and browsing for people. Searching isn’t about content it’s about people and then content. Not very helpful for getting your job done, but very helpful ensuring you don’t ever forget another fiends birthday again.