Totally Addicted to Face
The tale of the Internet is filled with unlikely success stories.
Who would’ve thought that Facebook would work?
Facebook, if Oxford’s student press is anything to go by, is the latest, most crazy craze. Created by a Harvard undergrad as a local social networking tool, allowing his mates to make profiles and link to those of their “friends”, it spread virally around said Yankee campus faster than H5N1-greased lightning, and was quickly rolled out to other US “schools” (it’s what they call universities — quaintly diminutive, don’t you think?).
The UK release started, somewhat pretentiously, with Oxford and Cambridge, and the service is now trickling down through the rest of the nation’s institutions in approximate order of perceived prestige, with places like Bristol, Warwick and Nottingham following in the second wave, and everywhere else being mopped up slowly as it trickles “down”.
For a sample, view the externally-viewable version of my profile. (There are a few features disabled, and clicking on any of the links will request that you log in, so my apologies to anyone lacking a coveted Facebook account.)
Geeks would berate Facebook for not providing any functionality that the Internet didn’t already have. I’ve even seen this accusation levelled at ‘blogs and, whilst technically true (it’s always been possible for people to post information and opinions in reverse chronological order on the Internet), the geeks should get off their high horse: what matters is the convenience with which the service is provided to its audience.
I run a nerdy ‘blog using WordPress, tweaked a little with my moderate knowledge of PHP, but it’s quite possible to pop over to Blogger, LiveJournal and the like, and stick a flag in your own reverse-chronological little corner of the Internet without even knowing what HTML is. That’s progress, of a sort.
Friends Reunited certainly predates Facebook, and I imagine were I to do my research that I could find scores of sites providing the same functionality a few years before. Hardened geeks might even claim that communities of HTML-coders could have done this long-hand with text editors years before. So why has Facebook spread across Oxford like some kind of sexually-transmitted margarine? (That was quite an odd simile.)
Simple answer: dunno. Apparently the founder is now raking in advertising profits, so if only I’d thought of that idea I could be doing just that, which would be nice.
Facebook is also riddled with flaws: all the terminology is in confusing Stateside lingo, along with the birthday dates being back-to-illogical-front. One of Facebook’s most novel features (that you can search for people through things they have in common: you can list favourite music, favourite films, clubs/jobs, interests and so on, and clicking on any of those on anyone’s profile finds everyone with that attribute in their profile) is almost totally unusable (people haven’t realised that this is possible and, for it to work, they have to separate their various interests et cetera with commas - there are lots of people with bizarre unique favourite films like “star wars (well” because they wrote “star wars (well, I am a physicist)”).
Some would argue it has positive quirks, though; it only allows easy networking within your university (you can have friends at “other schools”, but you can only view their profiles once they’ve confirmed that they are indeed your friend) which has been cited as a boon for its viral spread because such a closed community fosters rapid propagation. It’s also not that hard to use, particularly at the most likely level of use which doesn’t involve searching for people at your university who like the same range of pretentious favourite films you’ve chosen to make your profile look “arty”.
It is, if any user is honest with themselves, an unproductive total waste of time. Facebook “friends” stretch the definition of the word to its limit, and should really be called “vague acquaintances”. It’s loaded with fake profiles and misinformation (though, like Wikipedia, there does seem to be a reasonable trend towards honesty, at least when it won’t make you look un-”arty”).
But people still signed up in droves and now browse it for hours. So why did it work?
It just provided the right service at the right level of complexity to the right people at the right time.
That’s all you need to hit the Internet jackpot. Simple isn’t it?
I think I’m going to need a more instructive deconstruction before I rake in my first dot com million.