Laurent's Blog

Saturday, June 02, 2007

The Facebook phenomenon

After getting a flood of invitations to join Facebook from some friends, I decided to go and check it out for myself. The same had happened with Hi5 some time ago, but I must say Facebook is different, for the best. A few minutes after sign-up, I found myself wandering around, like in an empty hallway. So I immediately set to look out for people I may know. I uploaed my list of contacts from my Gmail account and scanned the network for signed up friends.

Once I had connected with a good dozen of friends and work colleagues, the whole Facebook experience set itself in motion.

What’s so special about Facebook ?

Facebook offers the same kind of features as regular social networks :

• a personal profile page
• a list of contacts
• a list of groups

Facebook also allows users to post articles to their profile, in the same way MySpace allows some form of blogging.

But what really makes Facebook refreshingly different is a whole set of subtle ways to hear from the contacts inside your network.

The Mini-Feed

The “Mini-Feed” inside your profile is designed to display all the online networking activity of your personal Facebook contacts. It will tell you whatever your contacts have decided to share with their network. If your friends add photos to their profile or make new friends, you will be notified.

The status update : what are my friends doing ?

Another interesting feature is the status update, which acts like a mini inbuilt Twitter-like functionality. It allows users to quickly tell their contacts what they are up to. But my favourite feature is by far the photo-tagging. Whenever you tag a friend on one of the photos you uploaded to Facebook, he will be notified via his own mini-feed news stream. I think it’s a very neat way to increase the site’s addictiveness, and I find myself checking out my friends photos regularly, nearly every day.

Sticky Facebook

While I have tried out many social networks before, none of them had proved sticky with me. I would just upload a few pics, fill in my profile, add a few friends, and wait. Apart from collecting friends, there was nothing to bring me back to the site. Facebook managed to create a real networking platform, that lives and breathes, and I believe it is well on its way to become something in-between email and instant messaging.

An open social networking platform

Mark Zuckerberg, young CEO, recently announced that Facebook was to become an open platform, allowing developers to create new applications and features for the site. New apps already include Last.fm, iLike, HotorNot and Twitter, and there are new ones by the minute. No doubt these companies have their eyes on the 23 million active Facebook users.

This move to become a central platform for all existing online social networks puts Facebook as the anti-MySpace. While MySpace has consistently craked down on third-party widgets, Facebook is giving third-parties the tools they need to exist on their platform. It will be very interesting to see how MySpace evolves in a near future. My feeling is that MySpace will increasingly become a static “showcase” social network, on which artists will display their work, while Facebook is set to turn into a fast-pace social networking platform.

Also read: Facebook, the complete biography, on Mashable

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Digg kneels before the Digger Mob

How social sites can fall victim to user-generated discontent ... (ha ha)

After a digger posted a story linking to the decryption key for HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, Digg received a demand that the secret key be taken down from the site.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson wrote:

We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

From the moment when this story was effectively deleted, Diggers revolted - literally. They soon flooded Digg’s homepage with stories mentioning the decryption key. Users had taken over the site, and unless the management of the site massively deleted articles, there was not much that could be done.

In a later post, co-founder Kevin Rose posted Digg’s capitulation:

(...) after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Users had turned into a mob and had bullied their way through.

While there is an undeniable romantic revolutionary touch to this event, I can’t help thinking that it is nothing less than puerile vandalistic anarchism. Like spoilt kids who were spanked on the back on their hand for breaking the rules they had agreed to.

The users giveth, and the users taketh away.