…and here’s why:
As some of you may know, it is festival time here in Edinburgh, Scotland. And by that I mean the Fringe Festival, International Festival, Book Festival, Art Festival and apparently this year, outside my flat, the Taste of Spain festival (aren’t we glad that was only 10 days of blaring music past midnight and bad karaoke).
Anyhow, more on the festival fun/shows etc in detail later, however, my Mister and I (the opposite of a Missus, no?) went to a couple stand up gigs Saturday night, last minute thing, in the pouring rain. It was actually really good. They’re were quite funny, even though not top quality, but both, and it caught my attention then, mentioned in someway or another: Facebook.
Facebook. Not MySpace, not Twitter, not e-mail or Friends Reunited or whatever else is in the blogsphere and doesn’t cross the line over to the more technical minded peeps. I know Twitter boarders.
Even in everyday life, I have noticed that FB will be referenced quite a bit more, and freely, by people without shame, whereas Myspace is a bit, “um…yeah…started it years ago, but never check it…”
iPhone ads: facebook; Columnists in the Independant: facebook; Comedians: facebook.
Even when out the other night, instead of asking for my card, phone number, e-mail address etc, it was “do you have a facebook account?”
Long live facebook?
Funny about “my Mister” 🙂 While I think you are right, it’s “king” right now – I don’t think that means it will remain so.
What’s important is the concept (social network), not its manifestation. There’s a lot of work afoot on building “portable social networks” – ones that aren’t tied to a particular provider (such as facebook). With this in place, you could be in myspace and in facebook and in x, y and z – it won’t matter. You’ll be able to inhabit all of the social spaces at the same time with little to no work – they’ll “share” your portable social graph.
What matters is your social graph, and you’ll one day (I bet) use a provider (such as Facebook) based on what additional functionality they provide, and Facebook may or may not be King then…
I was going to start talking about friendfeed, but I felt I would have gotten off point and was going to save it for another post I would have never gotten to!
I appreciate FF and how every time I do something on friendfeed, the FF application on FB enables it to be shared on FB as well. Thus, intertwining the two, almost seamlessly. However, I don’t feel that FF is as user friendly or interactive enough for most people. It takes people with accounts in all theses other places and puts them into a portal, yes, but it only really works for like minded people, with similar accounts, to link into the same portal. I find it more tech-social minded than social-social minded, which is what , I believe, many FB/MySpace users are looking for. Some fun.
Ha, and I never even mentioned FriendFeed 🙂 Even FriendFeed doesn’t embody a “portable” social graph. It’s open, but still not portable. So even FF will not reign (in its current state).
You’ve already made a decision on using FB because of its services (in addition to its encapsulation of your social graph). Now imagine a free market of social network sites that all contain your social graph (because one day it will be portable) – you’ll have a lot more choice as to which network to use. (ie. use FB for the fun, but use CoffeeMornFaceFeedBook for events and so on).