>Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life.
I really do agree with this.
I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't post at all. Ever. I've never 'liked' anything to my knowledge. I've had the same three or so pictures on my profile for years, and I've never posted a status update once.
But you know what? Everybody I've ever known and still care to is on there, in my friends list. Paradoxically, it is Facebook's relentless pursuit of building the social graph (privacy be damned) that allowed it to crawl the address books of almost everyone I've ever known and let them track me down and attempt to friend me. Friends from middle school who I've wondered about for years. Right there. Family members whose contact information I'd never have tracked down. Right there. An entire database of all the people I could possibly care about and care to contact in my lifetime (even if it's just once every few years) is right there. All of this with zero effort expended from me.
Last year I was in NYC and was lamenting the loss of an old phone with a lot of contact numbers from friends who had moved out of state or I had otherwise lost touch with. I particularly wanted to meetup with one friend who had moved out to run a museum, but no longer had her number or email handy. I suddenly remembered "Oh wait. Everybody is on Facebook whether they use it or not." Fired it up, searched her name, found it, sent a message with my number, and 8 minutes later she called me for drinks.
That is great. That is useful and relevant to me. Facebook is a social home base. For me it is like the ultimate address book that self-populates and bombards you with tremendous amounts of noise that you wade through when you open it to do what you came there to do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value.
>"but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value."
You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.
The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.
Precisely. My anecdote is little comfort to a platform looking to extract value from its users by targeting ads at them.
But it's better than nothing. At least I'm sticking around for the opportunity for them to someday extract value from me. If they didn't have this hook, I'd abandon the site completely. Compare that to something like MySpace in its heyday, which never had anybody's real life social network on there in any meaningful sense. Absolutely nothing to keep them there, and leave they did.
I really do agree with this.
I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't post at all. Ever. I've never 'liked' anything to my knowledge. I've had the same three or so pictures on my profile for years, and I've never posted a status update once.
But you know what? Everybody I've ever known and still care to is on there, in my friends list. Paradoxically, it is Facebook's relentless pursuit of building the social graph (privacy be damned) that allowed it to crawl the address books of almost everyone I've ever known and let them track me down and attempt to friend me. Friends from middle school who I've wondered about for years. Right there. Family members whose contact information I'd never have tracked down. Right there. An entire database of all the people I could possibly care about and care to contact in my lifetime (even if it's just once every few years) is right there. All of this with zero effort expended from me.
Last year I was in NYC and was lamenting the loss of an old phone with a lot of contact numbers from friends who had moved out of state or I had otherwise lost touch with. I particularly wanted to meetup with one friend who had moved out to run a museum, but no longer had her number or email handy. I suddenly remembered "Oh wait. Everybody is on Facebook whether they use it or not." Fired it up, searched her name, found it, sent a message with my number, and 8 minutes later she called me for drinks.
That is great. That is useful and relevant to me. Facebook is a social home base. For me it is like the ultimate address book that self-populates and bombards you with tremendous amounts of noise that you wade through when you open it to do what you came there to do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value.