Seriously though, nearly everyone I know at university uses it. It’s like a second email account; something so basic that you wonder how you managed to survive without it.

Because everyone uses it, it’s almost a digital interface for the real world. It’s more social than email simply because it’s more public and out in the open.

Dunno, that’s my take on it.

I use sites like these to keep track of my friends. All my friends are on Facebook; they are also on Myspace. Facebook has multiple layers of privacy, so that all my friends can find my phone number if they lose it and I can find theirs. Myspace pages frequently take more time to load than my browser itself. Facebook pages might have a few thumbnailed photos.

And the rest of these sites? Nobody I know uses them.

However, I can’t speak to it as a general social network; I certainly don’t use it as much now that I’m out of college.

the tagging system on facebook is really good.
do others offer that too?

One thing I’ve noticed is that it provides a structure for interactions with other people whereas the tools I’d rather use (email, blog, flickr, etc) are less structured; e.g. a friend who I’ve been pestering to start a blog for years and who always says ‘I don’t have time’ or some other excuse signed up to Facebook a couple of weeks ago and now has a load of friends, daily postings, photos, etc, etc. And this person is a programmer / IT consultant so it’s not like he’s afraid of technology, but more like he’s afraid of an empty textbox – facebook puts and easy ‘not so serious’ structure on the interactions so people can dive right in.

I do find it weird how (intelligent) people quite happily live in the roach motel – a friend from school who caught up with me still insists on using the built in messaging and other tools rather than email, even though I sent him links to my email, blog, and flickr account. Totally baffling.

I guess the clever thing about facebook is that it is a jack of all trades and master of only one: having all your friends already there. Photo sharing is no way as good as flickr, smugmug, zoomr, etc but it’s easy and instantly shared to your friends, the ad system isn’t as good as Craigslist, but again simple and instantly shared, the messaging is web based mail of 8 years ago (with a single ajax effect) but it’s simple to message your friends and seems free of spam so far.

I was never cool enough to get invited to Orkut when it first came out so I can’t compare the two, but that’s where Facebook differs (now they’ve opened it up) – you don’t need to be cool to be on it.

Michele: I agree, compared to LinkedIn Facebook seems very messy and lacking in polish (and MySpace is even worse), however my living room is messy and lacking polish compared to the houses in ‘Home & Garden’ and other design magazines – I think some of the messiness is what appeals to people as it’s obviously personal and something used by humans.

Michele

i’ll give my view on what facebook is useful for:
you know those people who you recognise but you never really speak to, if ever.
the people who you’d probably like to get to know, but dont have any real reason to talk to.
well, on facebook, its less of a social taboo to step outside your immediate circle of friends
these are people that you generally wouldn’t fire off an email to randomly to say hi.
its ok to go to your friends list of friends, find someone you recognise and send them a message

to summarise, facebook is useful not to keep track of your own friends, but moreso to get to know your friends friends and make them yours too.

matt.