So, Facebook, why did it grow so fast?
Did it? I have been using it a lot lately, but I joined well over a year ago. It seemed quite slow for at least the first 12 months I was on it and I didn’t bother using it much at all. It’s only in the past few months I’ve found it to be worthwhile.
Anybody?
My guess is because you can look up people by either email or name plus it has better privacy than myspace. Twitter’s the social network to look at to study present growth spurts.
Mine talks like a pirate and I be eyin’ it with pleasure.
No spam, can see family and friends photos right away, no spam, can put up videos, no spam, easy chat interface, no spam, easy messaging.
I much prefer using it over my yahoo mail, as I don’t lose nearly as many emails. Just don’t put up dumb or embarrassing photos and videos.
Mainly I think it saved kids the trouble of talking on the phone with their friends all night because now they can talk to many people at the same time.
Mine has spam too. If that’s what you call the ads that are disguised as applications. “You have 12 messages from beautiful women who are interested in you!”
Personally I believe they did it by rifling through everybodys emails accounts for their e-mail address lists. The application for doing this can be bought online for a hundred bucks. That’s what allowed them to grow so fast. They copied the idea from another site called Hi5 I believe. In fact Facebook was just a copy of Myspace and other existing sites, I’m wondering did Myspace employ the same tactic? Sure they have reasons that they are popular compared to other social networks but the e-mail thing was a big part. I agree aswell that Facebook is a better communication tool than Yahoo for friends and family.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17228
I logged on to my facebook today and it’s asking to search my Yahoo address list to add on more members, this time it redirects me to the Yahoo site. So for at least 2 years they got away with a very subtle e-mail address invasion before people started complaining (seems to me).
What’s amazing to me is that they could away with this (e-mail penetration) with hardly anybody complaining. I mean companies get sued for a lot less, I think if I had tried to do this with a company based in Taiwan or China that wasn’t so ‘cool’ there would have been an uproar. Human psychology is strange.
God, that thing is a pain in the arse. Every fucking day I get a gazillion dumb messages on gmail telling me some shit about facebook. I never look at the damn thing hardly. It doesn’t load half the time, and the times that it DOES load I can’t figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to do. A load of rubbish. Good for kids though, I suppose. They don’t seem to GET that I already know how to get in touch with the people I need to, that I simply have no need or desire to connect with some geek from deep in the mists of time and that if I ever DO have such a need, I can manage perfectly well without facebook.
It’s just a tool. sandman, you can deactivate all those email notifications.
The ‘good for kids’ thing is key, for me. One thing that has been wonderful about it for me is that I have got in touch with some of my cousins and their kids and it works in a non-threatening, non time-wasting way. Those kids are not going to call up their ‘strange auntie from abroad’, but they do drop me a line on facebook now and again. It was very important to all of us to speak on facebook through a difficult family time a few months ago.
It is weird how many people get in touch from the past. I made friends again with a girl I hadn’t seen for fifteen years, even though she was a very close friend when I was a kid. There was a little frostiness over one of those stupid things, but facebook just cuts through it. I also got in touch with some people from university and who I knew when I first got to Taiwan. I get to keep in touch with people I wouldn’t call (although my mother’s not on it) or whose email address I don’t have. Although I don’t ‘need’ to be in touch with people, it helped to get back in touch with these folk after ten years on the other side of the world.
But status updates about your kids/cat every two minutes! (the occasional pic is ok; I’m not the wicked witch of the west; I just don’t want to know about the boring offspring of some boring daft mare who bored the shit out of me for five years at school) Fuck the fuck off. Create a ‘family’ channel! Facebook is improving as it allows you to filter what you do and don’t want.
I don’t get people that slag fb 24/7. If you don’t like it then just deactivate yr account…if you don’t like photos of peoples cats (and I agree that’s pushing it) just block feeds from whoever posts that type of content…
…me I like it…plus the texas hold 'em rocks…
Blah blah… nobody think it’s weird they can root through all your e-mail accounts and make it so low-key that most people don’t know how it operates…double standards.
Anyway, I think it’s a great tool for keeping in touch with folks and friends back home…organising meet ups etc.s
[quote=“headhonchoII”]Blah blah… nobody think it’s weird they can root through all your e-mail accounts and make it so low-key that most people don’t know how it operates…double standards.
Anyway, I think it’s a great tool for keeping in touch with folks and friends back home…organising meet ups etc.s[/quote]
It’s not weird. It asks you if it can go through your email.
They cannot root through your e-mail unless you let them.
[quote=“the bear”]I don’t get people that slag fb 24/7. If you don’t like it then just deactivate yr account…if you don’t like photos of peoples cats (and I agree that’s pushing it) just block feeds from whoever posts that type of content…
…me I like it…plus the texas hold 'em rocks…[/quote]
Sounds to me like that would involve clicky clicky login, clicky clicky click clicky – fuck! There goes ANOTHER 15 minutes!
I just went to it and found out that some twat I’ve never heard of is “pondering where he’s at.” Jesus!
[quote=“Buttercup”][quote=“headhonchoII”]Blah blah… nobody think it’s weird they can root through all your e-mail accounts and make it so low-key that most people don’t know how it operates…double standards.
Anyway, I think it’s a great tool for keeping in touch with folks and friends back home…organising meet ups etc.s[/quote]
It’s not weird. It asks you if it can go through your email.[/quote]Right. And what it does with that is find out which of your email contacts are on Facebook so you can add them as friends (or at least send them a friend request) very easily. If I remember rightly, they don’t hold onto your email password after that. (The paranoid may wonder if that’s actually the case. The more sensible will confine themselves to worrying about much more likely Facebook security concerns such as dodgy app developers sneakily changing their apps after they’ve been approved, and grabbing some of your info for their own purposes before the FM admins can shut them down. The easy solution for that is to not install dodgy-looking apps.)
Facebook’s email contacts lookup is completely different from Hi5 which goes through people’s email contacts and automatically contacts them by itself. And apparently keeps on contacting them sometimes even after they’ve asked for that not to happen.
Excuse me if this is thick and untechy, but don’t all sorts of programs do stuff like this? For example, if you want to import contacts from one email address to another?
Right. And obviously people should only do that for programs/services that they trust. I let Facebook look through my Yahoo contacts, and chose to make a few friend requests based on the matches to my contacts that it found. Neither me nor anyone I know has had any spam (the real kind, not just notifications that you can’t be bothered to switch off) as a result of that.
Hi5 is quite a different thing. It sends its own emails to your contact list en masse, often repeatedly.
Facebook’s growth has been nothing short of incredible. What you’re asking actually encompasses a broad scope of what breaks down to several developmental phases and marketing shift/pushes…
In the beginning, when Facebook first surfaced, it was merely limited to Harvard, and it caught on like wildfire because they had connections with the fraternities, sororities, etc. Within a few weeks they had the entire campus utilizing it, within 2 months all major ivy league schools, and then most every university in the U.S. followed after that. From its beginnings, The Facebook, as it was known then, carried an air of exclusivity, and this was exactly why everyone liked it so much - it was targeted and geared for the university students only, and you could only ever add people you knew in real life. The name itself is derived from the campus book directory of student community members known as the facebook. This is how it gained it’s initial momentum… and all how it ever spread in this way was solely through word of mouth… so that’s how they reached 7 million+ members.
One particular point I like in Facebook’s history is when Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, declined Yahoo’s bid for 1 billion dollars when facebook was looking like it was on the decline and unable to expand past it’s initial inertia. It’s rather infamous.
But they were able to succesfully expand its network to high schools, gear to the international market, add facebook apps, api, extensibility, groups, pages, and a host of other things which helped facebook to grow even more. Now it is different from what it initially was… now people join facebook because everyone is on it, and it’s like the new “hey you got msn?”
More than anything, it’s addictive.
I’ve been on Facebook for roughly two weeks. For me it works better then IM because you don’t have to initiate a ‘chat’. Chats can be a bit difficult to end after you’ve said what you want to, but with Fbook you can keep in touch with people without getting stuck. I like the fact that you can post links, photos and silly stuff (If you are so inclined). I was surprised to find that both my parents had accounts which I wasn’t aware of.
I am discovering things about my family becasue of Fbook. I had no idea my cousin was married. Bit sad isn’t it?
At the end of the day Fbook is just an other means of communication, it is free, convenient and most of all useful. That is probably why it has become so popular.
L.