Lemak Lemang

Hooked on Facebook. Haven't you?

Jul 23, 2007 14:02

I decided to sleep through it when Friendster and MySpace.com made the raging rave in social networking tools. But when Facebook.com came around with the open applications in May, I got hooked.

To put it simply, Facebook is an uncanny combo of a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme interlaced with the theory of Six Degrees of Separation. It's a formula that glues you to insane loyalty, and you keep going back to the homepage several times a day.

The reason is simple. Human beings are voyeurs in disguise. You want to know what your neighbors and peers are doing in situ, and the kiasu mentality urges you to keep abreast with the Joneses on what's hot and what's cool in town. Facebook satisfies all your Freudian desires in cyberspace. This guy Mark Zuckerberg is a messiah for Web 2.0 and New Media. With Facebook, he had mouse-trapped real people with real connections on one common page!

Like it or not, Facebook has a Harvard origin. Zuckerberg and a few others co-founded Facebook in 2004 with a view to social-networking the undergraduate population at Harvard. It later expanded to MIT, Boston University and Boston College, and onward to the rest of the Ivy League and a few other colleges.

Zuckerberg and his team moved to Palo Alto, California, by mid-2004 to continue developing Facebook with additional funding.

Today, its new user sign-up averages 10,000 per day! With a growth of 3 percent per week, the Facebook user community is quadrupling on a yearly rate. By May 2007, it had 24 million active users who register an average of 40 billion pageviews per month. With this kind of traffic, it has overtaken eBay in user traction, and closing in on the numbers held by Goggle currently.

We also noted that when Facebook first kicked off from Palo Alto, its users were predominantly high-school students. Today, it has captured the crux of the 25-year-old and above age group, with 60 percent of them outside college. That's exactly where I am!

Most importantly, about 50 percent of these 24 million active users return to the Web site everyday.

At the recent F8 keynote address, Zuckerberg revealed his business model that was based on his intimate, manipulative understanding of the social graph, and a movement that had wanted to put an end to a closed developer platform adopted by previous social networking services. Here are the three new components that would likely make Facebook a de facto operating system, namely:

1. Deep integration of third-party applications tied to the Facebook platform
2. Mass distribution of information across the Facebook platform
3. Tapping into a new business opportunity. (I will detail all these in my column in the upcoming edition of SURF! magazine.

I am glad that the issue of privacy protection is well-catered to as the Facebook user is empowered to determine the level and extent of personal data exposure to the open work. The mechanism uses a simple privacy tag.

With a collective active user count of 24 million, with 50 percent daily return visits, Facebook still affords a fast, dynamic user experience. Overall, I am convinced that the kind of constipated downloads I had with Flickr.com and YouTube.com is not an issue with Facebook--at least not just yet.

Content-wise, Amazon.com distributes its archive of book catalogs and reviews for the "Virtual Bookshelf" application--which I like very much--and users are now able to create compelling slides using applications provided by slide.com.

So far, I have now joined 18 Groups in Facebook, with the latest one being Journalists and Facebook, which has 382 members worldwide.

I have also begun to integrate my events and personal notes with my Weblogs to garner extended exposure. One day, should I venture into politics, I will certainly experiment with promoting my political rally the way that Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton had started in the US presidential race.

Or should I Facebook my mom for now?

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