Facebook does not lack for facetime these days.
Facebook, Facebook, Facebook: everywhere you go in the world of business news, it seems you stumble across the smiling mug of its young CEO/founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
There are several good reasons for this: First, Zuckerberg drew attention to the company (and himself) when he turned down a (rumored) $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo!. Mind you, he didn’t turn it down for the publicity — it’s apparent that he believes he has bigger fish to fry with Facebook. Second, Facebook is growing like gangbusters, adding something north of 100,000 users per day. Third, there’s been a huge overall interest in social-media sites, including MySpace and LinkedIn, because as a group they’ve gone beyond being interesting to being important in business terms. Finally, Facebook has recently launched a platform strategy, which allows Facebook to act as a Web portal and provide online services, e.g. to let people see what their friends are shopping for.
I’ve used Facebook, the interface is clean and clear, and it’s easy to see why college students would have been drawn to it from the first. Now that it has escaped the campus, Facebook is connecting even more people around the world, and I have little doubt that it is going to enable lots of business networking as well. What this will mean for LinkedIn and Visible Path (full disclosure: a business partner of Hoover’s) is anybody’s guess.
For more on the phenomenon that is Facebook, try these links:
–In this long expert commentary, Marc Andreessen (you may recall that he founded a little outfit called Netscape) analyzes the new Facebook platform strategy.
–In this piece, uber-blogger Robert Scoble talks about iLike, an online music service that is already benefiting hugely from Facebook’s platform approach.
–Political media maestro Jeff Jarvis contemplates the ramifications of Facebook here.
–In this piece, Dan Farber of ZDNet talks about last week’s agreement between Xing and ZoomInfo, with thoughts on what it could mean for Facebook and other competitors. (My thumbnail take: Farber’s probably right about people using Facebook without regard to the supposed divide between professional and personal life.)
–Finally, this long Fast Company feature (complete with sidebar) goes into ample detail on Facebook and Zuckerberg’s vision for it.
Do you use Facebook? What for? Will it boom like Google, fade like Friendster, or land somewhere in-between?
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Tim,
There’s no doubt that Facebook is doing amazing things, but right now the main applications you mentioned are used differently. I don’t post pictures of my kids to LinkedIn, and I don’t broadcast sensitive, company-related requests through Facebook. But we’re clearly in the early days of social networking. Today, individual networking sites are destinations and, for the most part, silos. It’s easy to see those silos breaking down over time and peoples’ real networks, not their affiliations with branded social networking sites, being available at their fingertips as they execute their daily tasks. Scoble has an interesting post here http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/18/social-networks-as-friend-nazi-design-flaws-in-facebook-jaiku-twitter/ that complains about current designs in a way that suggests what future paths might be for social networks including LinkedIn, Visible Path (my employer) and countless others that will no doubt launch soon.
Lynda
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