I got talked into joining Facebook last week; ok, I’m late to the party but not quite as late as Derek Miller. It’s an interesting place in many ways, feels like it has more or less achieved what Orkut (remember Orkut?) was trying to do.
The big difference to Orkut is the people who are there, or at least the people I can find who are there. Facebook seems to have three major groups of people:
- recent and current university and college students (not surprising, given where it came from)
- parents and relations of the above, who want to see what their young relatives are up to
- Web 2.0‑style web geeks
Not surprisingly, the latter group are generally taking full advantage of being able to add applications on top of Facebook, and customizing their profile pages, and generally showing the rest of us how much time you can spend doing these things. Me, I’m trying to think through some of the privacy implications before I hook up my Dopplr account, and the copyright implications before I start putting my blog postings up there.
I eventually deleted my Orkut account, despite having lots of connections, because I just never went there, the content wasn’t interesting enough. Facebook is strangely compelling, it’s easy to browse through groups and rely on serendipity to take you interesting places. A bit like the web itself, in microcosm. It’ll be interesting to see how my usage develops.