Facebook: Passing fad or here to stay?

What with the manic craze sweeping the world right now (and stealing further work hours from our weekdays, as though blogging wasn’t enough of a distraction), Peas and I had a mini discussion on the issue of Facebook’s longevity, and are unresolved on the issue.

But before I get into reasons why / why not this craze might survive longer than the average Hollywood marriage, let me give you a brief history of its origins…

Young computer programming whiz, Mark Zuckerberg (born in 1984), has other acclaimed software projects behind his name – most notably a media player that learns your taste in music based on your previous song choice behaviour, and then designs playlists to suit you.

Facebook was born out of a combination of a number of his previous programs, including the following: Facemash, which uploaded two Harvard students’ photos onto the Internet, for viewers to vote who was hottest (he got into a lot of trouble for that); and Coursematch, which allowed Harvard students to see which other Harvard students had enrolled for their courses.

Facebook was released at Harvard in February 2004 and by mid-year had reached membership across the country of 150,000, through participation of Ivy League university students.

Zuckerberg (due to graduate in 2006) left Harvard in that year to run the website full-time, as revenues from advertising grew along with membership (then released outside of the elite university network). According to Wikipedia, membership today stands at over 17 million.

My computer-expert friend tells me this project is most certainly not the first of its kind – since 1995 the concept has been attempted to be plied in the mainstream, but never before has there been a critical mass of socially-bent Internet users to support these, hence Facebook’s success.

Right, that’s the history out the way. Onto the burning question: but will it last? I guess the answer to that lies in its perceived value, or lack thereof (and I must defend myself from any in-depth criticism of my comments here, I am a self-confessed Luddite, streets behind many of you in IT savvy).

A few months back, the whole LinkedIn networking craze hit us, and I’m told that serious networkers, particularly in the IT industry, use the utility quite religiously. I for one, have not looked back at my profile since the last time anyone new linked into it all those months ago.

A few other explosively popular social internet… activities (for want of a better term – maybe programmes? Help!) have emerged in the past few years – myspace (which incidentally I still don’t get), YouTube, and our own dear blogging addictions. All seem to have some form of staying power – at least judging by the fact that they don’t appear to be heading south anytime soon.

So why my skepticism of Facebook? In its defence, it’s a great way to hook up with lost souls from lives past, and a fun way to play the Kevin Bacon game. But beyond that, I’m not sure how much more value it holds. Sure, you’ll spend 1 obsessive week trying to amass a group of friends big enough to ascertain your alpha status in the social empire, but then what? You won’t use it to communicate regularly with close friends, will you? That’s what phonecalls, emails, SMSes are for. You might use it to communicate with long-lost friends strewn across the globe, but if you start communicating with them regularly, won’t it just be easier to get their email addresses and write to them that way, instead of having to log into Facebook (a painfully slow procedure, I find) every time you get email notification that someone has written on your wall/poked you/sent you a message? Also, you have your blogs, and one of the major reasons I started mine was so that friends overseas could follow my day-to-day life if they felt the burning need to do so.

Clearly I’m wrong – everyone I’ve spoken to disagrees with my view wholeheartedly. Will someone please explain what I’m missing?

I will acknowledge that it’s probably a fantastic tool for marketing – I’d imagine you can get very targeted advertising, perhaps you can advertise only to members of specific groups. G sent me an interesting article discussing MySpace’s US presidential primary election to be held in January next year (with membership supposedly high enough to have MySpace counted as the 11th largest country – although double-counting is likely as members can have more than one MySpace page). The article goes on to list the popularity of the candidates’ own MySpace pages – take the time to read through the readers’ comments on the article, especially those of representative this sample population is of the voting population. Anyhow, the author’s comment mentions the value Facebook would have over MySpace in holding this primary: Facebook’s user base is considered to be of higher quality, as accounts are tied to email addresses or cell phone numbers, and this identity check means duplicate profiles are far less likely, and US-based citizens can be far more easily identified (as the only participants in the election, the vote of global users is a largely irrelevant indicator of the election outcome)… A useful side use of the program, perhaps, but I assume not its creator’s primary intention.