2 responses to “Facebook: booming or decaying at the core?”
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“the discussion turned into a human wiki”. That’s one of the things I seriously dislike when reading online – the tendency to try and use an internet tool as a descriptor for something illustrated far better by the original term. A Wiki is one tool by which a discussion can be held and a consensus reached – it is a facilitator, and using it as above comes across to me as trying to be painfully hip. I must be getting old ;).
I’ve been pretty surprised that Facebook is so popular – the many invites I’ve received in my inbox made me think “Spam!” straight away. The positive comments I’ve come across surrounding its use came initially from the sense of security it provided vs MySpace, and then from its effectiveness as an old friends/family finder. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has raved to me about how great an apps platform it is – though I’m sure they’re out there :).
One interesting discussion I had was with a German lady, around a month ago, who had never heard of Facebook, but when it was described to her said “Oh, X-Business”. Apparently there was a German site which tried to do the same as Facebook a while back, but positioned for business. They failed because people used in as a social site, not for business! I’ve not been able to find the site and verify any of this, though, but it makes a nice story.
Ben
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personal feeling — based on no research — is that for ‘serious’ users, FB will settle down to being mostly a collaborative-filtering-based calendar/event recommendation engine (mostly because its a crying need and a really poorly-serviced need outside FB).
the rest, including that, will get blown away by OpenID and its descendants in 24 months or so (which means probably 10 years, given how wildly my timescales are generally out)
not putting money on any of that, mind
d
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