Why Facebook Works

A few weeks ago, perhaps even a bit longer than that, I was invited to get a Facebook account. I had never thought about using, say, MySpace, but I had been somewhat intrigued by Facebook as a cleaner version of MySpace.

But until I started using Facebook, I didn't realize what was its appeal.

To take stock of this, let me backtrack a bit. One of the earliest social networking sites of the ilk of MySpace was LiveJournal. LiveJournal has been around a while, and it focuses on one thing: blogging. You can't do that much more than blog. You can add friends, but mostly it's just their names.

MySpace also allowed for blogging, but you don't have to if you don't want. You can put some information about yourself. It has a few attractive features. First, you can add music fairly easily. There's an annoying player that starts off when you visit a page. And, then the other part, as far as I can tell, was the list of friends, which you showed off like collecting cards, and these two aspects, music and a long list of friends, seemed to appeal to lots of teens (and horrid backgrounds).

Facebook seems to dispense with blogging altogether. It's not easy to point to why Facebook works, but in a nutshell, I'd say it's the constant feed.

You have a feed of what all your friends are doing, and this constant activity lets you see who becomes friends with whom, and what groups or networks people are joining, what games they might be playing, and then you can "poke" people as well, forcing interaction in the simplest of ways. Facebook is kind of a mishmash of features from stuff like IRC (in slow motion) and game-playing.

I go to do two things. First, to add more friends to see what they are doing, and then to play this movie game, which I do partly to annoy someone else, and partly because it's mildly addictive (and not very satisfying, I must admit, though it's decidedly clever by not telling you what the top scorers have score, but merely telling you your rank).

And there is a twitter like status bar letting others know what you are up to. In a weird way, it's news of your friends, and it feels like this idea grew organically rather than being completely planned. This feed idea works even as many people who use Facebook don't even know what a feed (e.g., an RSS feed) is.

I talked to someone who's younger than I am, but has a pretty busy schedule who feels (correctly) that he has no time for this. In the end, Facebook is a time-sink, whether you are interacting with your friends, or doing individual activities.

I suppose Facebook also appeals to Web 2.0 folks, because it has the fade effects, and overlays, and so forth. Stuff you expect to see in typical Web 2.0 sites.

I dunno how long this will last, but I came to it late, and people still seem to be doggedly involved, even as many have abandoned MySpace, partly because blogging is way too time consuming for most people, whereas a Twitter like status is low barrier to entry. Rather than spew paragraph after paragraph, it's only one line, and the others read it, and possibly react to that one line.

I'll fill you in if I figure out more about why Facebook works so well.