facebook

Speaking from a user’s perspective I am a big fan of Facebook. I have only been on there for a couple of weeks, but of all the social networks I have trialled it is the one that makes the most sense to me. I have a myspace account and a hyves account, but the experience feels very shallow for me on both of those services. Facebook is very intuitive, there isn’t a lot of trial and error in finding out how to use different applications, in addition you can post on your own wall (which really irritated me with myspace) and you have your own e-mail/message centre.

As with all of these it makes it a lot more fun when you have people to interact with, which probably makes the experience richer to me. In terms of market share Facebook is still looking small potatoes (20MM vs Myspace’s 80MM). I would be interested to see how many people have moved their primary social networking site from one to another.I would think that your profile and friend network would create quite a high switching cost, all the effort of recreating your profile on another network would be too much trouble for most. Does this mean then that Myspace’s initial landgrab is unassailable?
From a work perspective I think they’ve also done a very smart thing in opening their service up for companies to develop applications for it. Their theory is that they make ad revenue off the extra inventory that these services create, as well as making Facebook an all inclusive web destination. By creating an API it makes all of your normal activities “widgetised” and able to add to your Facebook wall (I think Amazon is creating a favourite book widget), and Facebook becomes the hub for your web activity. They monetize through advertising, you monetize how you normally do so, compared to Myspace’s more aggressive policy this is an interesting proposition for developers…