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Part II: Facebook: “Let’s Talk”

The connectivity of Facebook is its greatest strength. It helps to carry over recently disrupted relationships, like the high school graduating class who are now college freshman, and to re-create social networks decades in hibernation (old 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings — college and high school buddies holding ongoing reunions online). In this sense it is essentially a perpetual e-yearbook.

One seeks out friends to sign it, with the depth of message attendant to such friendship: “What are you up to?” “Have fun at the beach!” “OMG” and “lol” have taken the place of K.I.T. and j/k. Like a yearbook, it relies heavily on photos as a form of community-building. Everyone gets to provide his own yearbook photo in the world of Facebook, and better yet, we all get to watch each other’s slideshows. Save me, somebody.

Worse, that guy you never wanted to sign your yearbook can become your “friend” because of the weird social protocol that inhibits the average person from wanting to continue to reject the reject he spent high school rejecting.

The major forms of social bonding I have found in my brief personal experience with Facebook are:

1)     old friends from high school re-establishing communication

2)     friends announcing what they have recently done or intend to do in the near future

• friends looking for friends to accompany them in their planned activities
• friends letting friends know what kind of person they are by announcing what they do or plan to do
•  friends reacting to what friends do or plan to do in order to let friends know what kind of person they are

3)    friends participating in FB-designed and -produced online surveys and  activities that connect to popular culture and, by extension, express who they are (Five favorite___________’s).

4)    occasional forays into cultural/political discussions that carefully avoid true dissent or careful argument

5)    occasional emotional distress expressed in statuses, directly or indirectly asking for help and sympathy

6)    compulsive sharers, sharing their every meal, drive into the country, or family event. These entries resemble “tweets” and may well be Twitter-generated

The phenomenon of #6 sharers is carried a step further (as hinted at above) with Twitter, which is not a yearbook, but more of a truncated journal written for a public. The egocentric basis and bias of Twitter is, to this observer, its most salient feature. (Which we will explore in our next post, bringing us full circle back to the “Look at me!” world of My Space, We will attempt to demonstrate the establishment of a pattern in terms of initial fluorescence, growth, establishment of market dominance, decline and diminishment of influence both in terms of usage and marketing/business success.) Before looking at Twitter, however, let’s probe a bit more deeply into Faceebook.

There is considerable evidence beyond the merely anecdotal to support my claim about the current ascendancy of Facebook and concomitant decline of MySpace. A number of articles attest to the trends:

Bank On It: Facebook Will Pass MySpace in US Popularity

December 18th, 2008 | by Adam Ostrow

The latest numbers are in from Nielsen Online, and they conclude the obvious: Facebook is downright surging in popularity. The site registered a record 47.5M US-based unique visitors in November, up from 39.9M just one month prior.

Top social network MySpace continued to hover around 60M, with an official count of 59.1M. If you’re looking for a shoe-in bet for your 2009 tech predictions, it’s this: Facebook will surpass MySpace in US traffic at some point next year.

Read the whole thing

And here is an even more current mapping of Facebook’s surging popularity.   

Fortune magazine has a balanced look at the strengths and challenges of the Facebook phenomenon in an article from April 15, 2009, titled “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow? The social networking site is growing — but that also means serious growing pains”  by Jessi Hempel.

And this blogger has some salient up-to-date statistics to confirm Facebook’s ascendancy.

Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs, Andy Kazeniac (contact – e-mail) — February 9th, 2009

So the evidence is ample, Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the leader in the social networking sector of the blogosphere. This piece is getting a little long, so we will extend our discussion of Facebook into another entry where we will examine how the structure of the Facebook site and the interactivity of the apps have popularized this next phase of the social networking cycle.