

Paul Buchheit: There's no such thing as a "social network" - toffer
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/theres-no-such-thing-as-social-network.html

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nostrademons
Most of my friends got onto FaceBook for #3, the glorified address book, and
stay on it for one of 3 other applications:

2.) Photo-sharing. As of now, it really seems to be the best photo-sharing app
on the net.

3.) Making plans to meetup offline or catch up with old friends. This seems to
be the most common use of the wall (and to a lesser extent, poke/superpoke),
though I gather some other social groups use it for actual silliness.

4.) Scrabble.

~~~
brlewis
What is it about facebook photo sharing that makes it best for you? Is it that
the photos of most interest to you are there? Is it a certain point of
integration with another facebook feature? Is there a unique feature of their
photo sharing function that you like?

~~~
nostrademons
It's a combination of:

1.) They have a pretty good multi-file uploader, so you can take a whole
directory of files and upload them at once.

2.) It's free. Many of the other sites with #1 require that you pay for it.

3.) You can tag your friends, and a notification in their news feed will pop
up saying they've been tagged in a photo. And all of _their_ friends will see
it, usually leading to tags for people you don't know.

4.) Enough of my friends are on it that #3 is useful.

A lot of this is network effects - I think Flickr has all of the above, though
some may be premium features. But FaceBook has a critical mass of people that
check it regularly, which makes 3 & 4 a lot more useful. If I post to Flickr
and tag my friends (can I do that?), there's no guarantee they'll see it.

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jraines
Very insightful.

This post and this article(1) by Clay Shirky should be required reading for
anyone building socially-oriented software.

1) <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html> Old news to some I guess
- but I just found it via a link nostrademons posted in a different thread and
it was the most interesting thing I've read all week.

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Goladus
That's a great consolidation of the features offered by typical software in
the 'social network' category.

It might also be worthwhile to distinguish the 'network effect' or 'network
lock-in' which is when significant parts of the value of a service come from
the people already using it.

~~~
brlewis
That's a good point. Even after FriendFeed destroys the network lock-in of the
current crop of social networking sites, it's important for people to remember
what network lock-in is, to look out for it in the future.

