Facebook part 2
part 1 : http://ajax.verkley.com/blog/brian/index.cgi?sid=193
Well I got the 10 invites (11 actually) and so I joined. Then I got about 10 more the next day. Friends of friends that saw me join added me to their friend list.
First impression: I like it. I have reacquainted with a few members of our kili climb that I would like to cross paths with again. I can communicate easier and more often with a variety of friends that I wouldn't have sent an individual email to before. Nothing earth shattering about it though. I don't really have a compelling reason for someone else to join.
The facebook platform and its potential really impresses me though. For example, search engines like Google typically give you the most popular page in the world for any given search term. The facebook engine (which for now just searches people and groups on facebook) gives you the most relevant result for you. For instance, if I looked up John Smith, there would be hundreds of results. The top on my list though would be any John Smith that is a friend of one of my friends. Following that would be any John Smith that is listed as working at Bell or living in Toronto, etc. Those John Smiths are much more likely to be the person I am looking for than some popular John Smith in LA or London England.
I'm not sure what other type of social network information will be of use to me in the future, but with the open facebook platform that allows anyone to write add on applications, I'm sure facebook is more likely to provide it to me than anywhere else on the net, including the net as a whole.
It is young and arguably useful, but I believe its future potential is bright. I'm looking forward to it.
Comments
One of the things that impresses me about Facebook is not only that they allow one to right apps for it, but that they allow external use of information contained within facebook (within reason). In my opinion they have handled the privacy issues quite well, and hopefully that continues.