I’ve been aware of Facebook exactly since the day it launched. And I’ve been ignoring it precisely since the very same day. Facebook started as a high-school oriented social networking site and I am definitely past my high-school days. But recently it’s opened up to everyone and they seem to have captured the imagination of the professional classes. I created my profile last week and immediately found myself with a network of over 10 friends and growing. Not bad for a few minutes doing random searches.
Facebook‘s strengths seems to be its strong real-world network orientation -it insists you tell it where you live and will make your profile available to all people living nearby; its stream of updates from your friends’ status -I’m afraid one of my friends may have split up with her man as her status is single from yesterday- and the way it pushes 3rd party apps by letting you know when your friends start using one, making it the perfect viral distribution channel for those apps, typically free and typically trading in your most precious asset – your personal information.
But that was the professional internetter in me talking. As a consumer, I just love to log in daily and see what everyone’s up to. If you use facebook, make sure to poke me when you log in next!
