Facebook | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook: A Series of Tubes?

TIME magazine’s recent article – “Why Facebook is the Future” – contains this excellent synoposis of what Facebook really is:

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not.

And so, with that description of Facebook as “a Net within the Net,” we can’t help but refer to Sen. Ted Stevens’ definition of the internet as a whole to help us better understand what Facebook is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE]

Sen. Stevens’ speech was repeatedly ridiculed on The Daily Show and elsewhere by those who thought it demonstrated a, well… less-than-complete understanding of the internet and how it works.Yet some of the chatter about Facebook and its suitability for business use doesn’t sound much more enlightened than either Sen. Stevens or Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, and her explanation of why U.S. students don’t know much about geography…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

Using Facebook for business won’t “plug up the tubes” and get in the way of the personal messages you want to deliver. It’s also not just for college students; the 35+ age demographic is the fastest growing segment among its 35+ million members.

Sure, many of the applications developed for its platform are pointless diversions, but there are some quite useful ones. For example, file sharing applications like Files and MediaFire provide shared virtual hard drives for file exchange. I’ll be reviewing those in a future post. Both provide handy work-arounds to the file size limits most people have in their email, and without the complicated language of ftp servers.
Others have raised the red flags – or red herrings – of inappropriately personal applications causing embarrassment. For example, a SuperPoke user might inadvertenly slap, bite, kick or pinch a business colleague instead of poking.

Egads! The solution to that would be, “Don’t slap, bite, kick or pinch your professional associates.” Or don’t install SuperPoke. Or why would you poke a co-worker when you could send a message instead?

Others suggest that personal photos posted by others, which appear on your Wall or in your mini-feed, could be embarrassing. Those situations can be substantially resolved by adjusting your privacy settings for your limited profile and not showing your Wall or mini-feed to your professional colleagues.

For some people who wouldn’t think of using Facebook for business, the language I just used is foreign; that’s because they haven’t tried Facebook, and so they are making judgments based on rumor and hearsay instead of personal experience.

Facebook is an information-sharing utility. It works well for personal, diversionary pursuits, and it works equally well for sharing information and creating discussions of professional topics.

Just as the same internet “tubes” carry personal and business emails — and even 10 movies at one time — so can the same Facebook infrastructure facilitate maintenance of personal and business relationships without getting things “tangled up.”

And there are even some map applications that could help Miss Upton.

Technorati: Facebook, Ted Stevens, series of tubes, Files, MediaFire, Facebook platform, Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina, maps

Facebook: Friction-Free Friendship

In a recent post in his From Where I Sit blog, Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt shares his frustrating experience in a couple of bookstores, where “friction” created by long lines and lack of available personnel caused him to abandon his purchases and instead opt for the friction-free environment of Amazon.com. He also relates his good experience at the Apple store, and how it is set up to make it easy to buy, with roving cashiers ready to swipe a credit card so you can be on your way.

Interestingly, the absence of friction is exactly the quality I used to describe Facebook earlier this month when I said it had reached a Tipping Point (and interestingly that judgment was affirmed in the last two weeks by a cover story in Newsweek and another important article in TIME.)

Facebook isn’t intended as a place to make friends, but it does eliminate a good chunk of the effort involved in maintaining the relationships you have with people you already know. If you are Facebook friends, you’ll see their birthdays, and occasionally some of their activities, in your news feed. And they’ll see some updates about you. All this happens without any effort at all. You can send them a message spur-of-the-moment message in a few seconds without having to look up their current address, phone or email, and you don’t need to worry about it getting stuck in an overactive spam filter.

Likewise, Facebook groups can make connecting with your business and professional colleagues easier. If you have key vendors, suppliers, customers or sources, you can send them a friend invitation (perhaps with access to your limited profile.) But another good alternative is to invite them to join a group, without them necessarily becoming your “friend.” You can use the Message All Members function to broadcast a message to all of them, or you can engage in a private conversation with any.

Because they’ve either opted in as your friend or as a member of your group, you can have priority access to each other. If you have the Facebook Mobile application installed, you can be alerted by text message on your cell phone whenever someone sends you a message in Facebook. That can enable you to provide the highest quality service and personal attention to people who are most important to your business or professional success.

Facebook is a slick tool for taking the friction out of maintaining relationships and exchanging information.

Technorati: Facebook, Groups, Friction, Michael Hyatt, Apple, Amazon, friends

Facebook in Time Magazine

Time magazine keeps up the pace with Newsweek in having a significant article about Facebook, as Lev Grossman writes, “Why Facebook Is the Future”

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it–a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you’re a dog.
Maybe that’s why Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they’re refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet’s founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook–it’s just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you’re annoying folks, you’ll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.

That’s right. Because it’s opt-in, Facebook is the Spam killer. It creates a whole new class of email, because the messages you get are from people you know. Anyone who is in Facebook can send a message to any other member, but those who repeatedly send unwelcome messages can be blocked or reported to be bounced from the network.Those who complain of the “walled garden” nature of Facebook should remember that sometimes walls are helpful: they keep the bad guys out.

Here’s a related interview from last month with Mark Zuckerberg. I highly recommend you read this as well. Here are some highlights:

TIME: Is Facebook’s popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.
Zuckerberg: That’s the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That’s a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community — we’re not trying to build a community — we’re not trying to make new connections.
TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a “social utility” rather than a “social network?”
Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.
TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company’s newfound cachet?
Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that’s something that’s pretty exciting to the business community. It’s also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.

TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?
Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven’t translated the site yet, but that’s something we’re working on and it should be done soon. What we’re doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.

This is great weekend reading, as is the Newsweek article, to give background on why Facebook will be such a force in the future of the internet. And I’ve written a few things about Facebook, too, particularly how it can be used for business.
Technorati: Time, Time magazine, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Newsweek