
You care about Facebook, you just might not know it yet - twampss
http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/you-care-about-facebook-you-just-might-not-know-it/
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theli0nheart
_ugh_. As if. Check out this list: [http://www.nettime.org/Lists-
Archives/nettime-l-0001/msg0008...](http://www.nettime.org/Lists-
Archives/nettime-l-0001/msg00085.html).

These are the results from Nielsen research listing the 25 most-visited
websites in 2000. Remember Looksmart? Excite (which, BTW, hasn't seemed to
have changed it's website since 2000)? These websites were relics of the time
when web portals were a big deal, much like how social networking is today.
Most of them have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The crowd always seem to believe that somehow "this time is different". This
is a naive behavior that is ubiquitous in finance, business, work,
friendships, etc. The fact of the matter is that human nature doesn't change.
People get bored of things and move on. The same will happen with Facebook,
Twitter, etc. Better things will be made because of it, too.

~~~
ericflo
Please fully read my blog post next time. The last paragraph states that I
wouldn't bet much on Facebook being around in 10 years.

~~~
graywh

      Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably.

~~~
ericflo
"Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably. _I'm not
willing to bet much on it._ "

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julio_the_squid
I personally don't care about having a Facebook account any more than I be
buffing up my MySpace account or a WoW character anytime soon. This cartoon
sums it up my attitude pretty well:
[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zp_eKXDTiU0/SiQyLywcJ7I/AAAAAAAAE7...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zp_eKXDTiU0/SiQyLywcJ7I/AAAAAAAAE78/Z1s7mxGYZbc/s400/new+yorker+cartoon+about+facebook.gif)

However, I agree that since so many people use Facebook, it's a useful and
important place to promote your business and for which to offer services.

It used to be that when we released widgets it was important to test on
Blogger, Typepad, etc. but these days more potential users are on Facebook
than Blogger. Of course, Facebook makes you jump through hoops to integrate
anything with their site, but the large potential audience makes it worth it.

~~~
unalone
Don't bother with widgets unless you know what you're doing. Creating an
entire new site _feature_ takes effort, and that's what coding for Facebook
is. Farmville did it, those damn quizzes do it, but I haven't seen more than
three applications in the last six months.

What you do is make a fan page for your product, and put everything you've got
there. Fan pages are beautifully integrated and give you a lot of control over
your audience. I used a fan page of myself to address young campers at a
summer program and they're _still_ talking to one another over it.

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roc
Facebook exists due to a transient inefficiency in yesterday's applications.

The big 'hook', the reason it gets so much traffic, is that people use it as a
proxy for the wider internet. It's many services funneled through one account.
(As opposed to having a gmail account for email, an msn account for chat, a
yahoo account for games, a flickr account for pics, a wordpress account for
blogging, a twitter account, etc)

But what keeps it relevant _tomorrow_?

~~~
glhaynes
The network effect. All your friends, family, etc are on there. Using their
real names.

You want to get back in touch with Joe that you knew in 5th grade? How are you
gonna do that over SMTP/IMAP? Easy on Facebook.

Or think about it this way: your aunt wants to put out photos of her family's
recent vacation for everybody she knows to see. Is she (if she can possibly
help it) going to go into her email app (or, worse, webmail) and make sure
she's got all the right names with their associated somewhat-cryptic (well
certainly more cryptic than a Normal Human Name) email addresses selected from
her address book? Her address book (if it's even populated at all) probably
doesn't have 10% of the email addresses that she wants to send to. And 1/2 of
those are out of date or mistyped.

There's still plenty of room for separate services that do things with more
options and with a broader reach. But for the basic cases (which is a LOT),
having a single shared service that nearly _everybody_ 's on (and on which
they don't have to remember a username->Real Name mapping), is a tremendous
asset.

~~~
roc
If the network effect alone was enough, we'd have never left Geocities, or
Angelfire, or Hotmail, or ICQ, or MySpace... the network effect explains
growth curves, little more.

The rest of your points were part of my point. "Real Names" vs "usernames" is
a temporary inefficiency in the early services. It's a typical programmer's
solution causing normal person frustration. No-one's making that mistake
again. No-one's going to roll out, say, an email service without a profile
page for each account or a White Pages feature. No-one's leaving out simple
photo/file sharing, tweeting or blogging as an integrated service.

And everyone who isn't FaceBook has a huge incentive to support the first
federated protocol that enables all that. (So they stand some chance at
capturing internet traffic again)

Say, Google's Wave.

Does anyone think it won't roll out with support for a profile page, some sort
of White Pages feature, simple blogging, twitter-esque status updates, etc?
It's already got email/chat integration and simple photo sharing this early.
Why in the world would they be testing photo sharing if they weren't looking
to do much more than 'Email 2.0'?

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forsaken
I think that you care about facebook if you work for a web 2.0 company that
needs users any way they can get it. I work for a local newspaper, and the
value that we get from facebook is pretty small. Everyone who needs to know
about our site knows it exists. Most of the community has accounts.

The only value we may get from facebook is allowing them to publish our events
easily. However, their API and their walled garden make that less valuable.

~~~
erikwiffin
I'm surprised you feel that way. I also work for a local newspaper, and a our
largest demographic is the 55+ group. It seems like getting the facebookers
(the under 30s) onto our site could really help.

That being said, I don't know how I'd do that, and we don't have facebook
connect because the API is more effort than it's worth.

~~~
unalone
Make a Page, publish your stuff via RSS, start local Facebook conversations,
ask people for local photos and for news of what's happening, possibly get
them contributing ideas for stories. The more you can get people swept away
into your cause, and that's not hard, then the more activity and attention and
relevancy you've got.

Probably the most attention I've paid to a company beyond Facebook, Tumblr,
and Reddit in these last few months has been to a clothing company with an
excellent Facebook presence.

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wmeredith
A more accurate title would be _You'll have to work with Facebook, you just
might not know it yet_.

I won't ever care. (Oh and by the way: <http://www.facebook.com/wwmkc>)

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tomjen2
I have seen how much time Facebook eats, so between Reddit and hacker news I
don't have more to waste.

Granted I could properly just ignore it most days, but then people would be
annoyed that I haven't friended them yet, send me messages that I would have
to respond to, etc.

As for the "login using facebook", you can do the same with openid (heck
facebook is an openid provider) - but without pissing of the part of your
users that don't have an account or don't want to let you know it.

