I’m not entirely sure what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking when he concieved the idea of Facebook in his dorm halls, but one certain thing is that it has taken the world by a storm. Mark is even on Time Magazine’s 2008 Top 100 Influential People.
A few years back, while I was studying at Imperial College London, there was a new fad that was passing by in Malaysia. I started to get all these invites to join Friendster from a few of my close friends back home. At that time, I was too busy with college and decided to leave it for another day – when I’ve got a few hours to myself.
Fast forward a few years to the present, and things have changed. I did join Friendster in the end, but my profile was at most a pathetic effort at reconnecting with my friends. I did find that Friendster had just too much bloat. At one point when Friendster first started, it had a nice clear function on the web – keeping in touch your friends, and meeting new people (friends of friends, etc). Then it started to burst in all directions! They added a plethora of new things, including blogging. In fact, they did get some celebrities to blog as well. Now, I think this is where most social networking sites fail. They just don’t stay true to their cause.
Facebook, on the other hand, is different in so many ways. To me, its just there for keeping in touch with current friends, long lost ones, and meeting new ones. I really couldn’t be bothered about the other fancy bits that come with Facebook (for example, their APIs that encourages others to build apps on top of it, which really should have excited the geek in me), and so far, have only used it heavily for sending messages to friends. Its an amazing tool to communicate with friends that I’ve lost touch. It allows me to send my friends messages by remembering their names, rather than email addresses, which changes frequently enough to hinder the communications process (I might even go as far as saying that it has replaced the need for traditional emails for me when communicating with friends).
This is where I think Facebook has jumped leaps and bounds over all other social networking sites: having a simple concept, and sticking to it through and through. I do remember Facebook starting as a college centric social networking site, but now they have expanded that to something amazing, without loosing touch from their goals.
I’m not putting down other social networking sites: my message is to take Facebook as an example, and find that one true reason for existence. Keep it simple, and stick to it. Success will follow. For the moment, there’s a lot of noise out there on the social networking scene. It will be interesting to see how many of them survive, and for those that do, what’s their one goal that made them succeed. For the moment, kudos to Facebook for setting the model, and the mark on quality and experience.
(No one paid me to write this – I am just an extremely happy user of Facebook)
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