Facebook

From LIS 460 Summer 2007

1 Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking site that was created in 2004 by a nineteen-year-old Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. He began it as a way for Harvard students to share basic personal information with each other online. The site expanded quickly encompassing other colleges, inspiring Zuckerberg to move out to California and launch Facebook as a company. Since then it has expanded across the globe. There are, at this point, something in the neigborhood of 25 million users, more and more each day. There are rumors that Zuckerberg was offerend $1 Billion to sell Facebook to Yahoo, but if this offer was indeed made, he turned them down. There's something apt and inspiring about a dedicated young person in charge of a company that's innovating on the web.

The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is people over 25.
60% of users are out of college.
50% of users visit the site everyday.
6th most trafficked site in U.S. and hopes to surpass Google.

(statistics quoted from f8 keynote, see link below.)

Facebook wants to take over the world, but if taking over the world means allowing information to travel virally across networks of friends, I'm pretty much okay with that.

Note: many of the links in the rest of this entry may need you to have a membership to Facebook

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How Does It Work?

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The Social Grid

"Facebook isn't just one big site; it's made up of lots of separate networks based around things like schools, companies, and regions." - Facebook Site Tour

Facebook is based on the notion that "people share information through their friends and people they know" (Zuckerberg). But, synchronous communication is inefficient because both people, or all people involved, need to be in the same place at the same time. By making a place for friends, contacts, and information about them to exist on the Internet allows people to be able to communicate with their friends and access information about them at any time.

So, you access information about your friends, and your friends access information about all of their friends, and so on and so forth, making everyone on Facebook subtly connected. This is what the Facebook team refers to as the social grid.

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Each user has:

A Profile: your home base on Facebook and a portal for your friends to see information about you. It includes your profile picture, your name, your status (this reminds me of twitter in that you can update it by filling in the blank. For instance, Erin is.... "glad it is the weekend".) basic information about you: name, birthday, sex, relationship status, hometown, polical views, religious views, all of which are optional and customizable; links to photos, a mini-feed displaying recent updates to information you might be interested in on your or your friends profile pages, a list of networks you belong to and friends in those networks, a list of networks in which you have friends; a list of groups you belong to; contact information; education information; other applications you choose to use; and the wall, a place for friends to leave you messages. There is also the option to send and recieve private messages. Users can change layout of their profile page and customize it to include or exclude any of the above features as well as any applications.

A News Feed: This is where you automatically go upon first logging in to Facebook. When you login you get an update on everything that's going on relevant to you and your friends, this could be comments, posts to your wall or messges from friends as well as changes to friends profiles or what applications friends have added or deleted.

A List of Friends: Here is where you can scroll through a listing of your friends, see their profile pictures and status updates, or click on them to go to individual profiles.

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Facebook also offers access to Applications

Applications on Facebook are components that can be added to your profile that allow you to share different types of content. There are applications that are made by Facebook and come standard when a user first starts an account (for instance, photos, groups and events), and then there are applications designed by users from which users can pick and choose which to include. Use of any and all applications is optional, and a user can add or delete an application from his or her profile at any time. In the interest of making things easier for you by gathering the information you've already given Facebook, if you grant permission, applications can see info from your account, from friends profiles, and from other applications.

Users can choose to use or not use a number of applications including:

photos: create photo albums with captions and tags to share with your friends.
videos: upload, view, and share videos with your friends.
questions: ask your friends questions and respond to theirs.
groups: join and create groups organized around just about anything.
events: invite your friends to participate.
twitter: check your tweets from Facebook
notes: write a note for all your friends to see.
catbook: facebook pages for your cat, so cute! Here's Azimuth's page
Polls: do some informal research across a broad scope of people - you have to pay, but it's not expensive. (creating a basic poll looks like it costs $6).

You can search for more Facebook Applications here.

Users can also design their own applications with Facebook Platform

Anyone can build an application. Facebook wants applications created by users to be on par with applications made by Facebook. Applications behave the same regardless of if they were created by Facebook or by one of it's users. Letting people build their own applications allows for creativity and communication across the board. Letting applications loose through the social graph causes their use to spread.

After the launch of platform, Facebook hosted an all-night coding session to create new applications: Facebook Hackathon

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A Bit About Security

"We believe that our users should have complete control of their information" (Zuckerberg, f8 Keynote).

All content is optional.
Users control to what degree they are searchable and what appears in their search listings.
Users can block other users.
Users can add and delete applications at any time.
Users are always asked to allow permission for applications to access their information.
Limited profiles allow different levels of "intimacy" with different friends.

For more information see Facebook Privacy Overview

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Facebook vs. MySpace

MySpace, for anyone who doesn't know, is the other "most popular social networking site ever." I think MySpace might be more popular with teens, and it's name seems to get more press, at least for now.

Reasons why I like Facebook better:

doesn't cause my computer to freeze.
you only need a few clicks to get things done.
cleaner, simpler look
with the new applications platform there is potential for endless customization.

Things I don't like about MySpace:

frequently freezes my computer
too many advertisements
it takes more than five clicks to comment on someones blog entry
loud music on some profile pages, seemingly without warning

Reasons why teens might like MySpace better:

more colorful
at this point, myspace is more customizable in terms of adding images and sound to individual profiles.
includes blogs as part of each profile

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Facebook in the School Library

Facebook is already being used by librarians including some at Simmons

Teens are always going to be interested in social networking. These types of sites give them a space to call their own, preferences to choose, affiliations to join up with, and people to meet all across the globe. Parents and educators are often concerned, and rightly so, that given all of this freedom online these teens might reveal too much about themselves and attract predators. A more common problem is that teens might create a lot of needless drama among friends and others by saying things they don't realize are published in the public eye. Using social networking spaces as a part of school curriculum would create opportunities to teach students how to be safe and sane online.

Facebook in particular could be used in many ways in and by a school library to connect library users and share information among them.

Networks in Facebook are based around a location, workplace or school (high school or college). A library might belong to a high school network, or suggest a new library specific network be created. Then people associated with that school or library could share comments/pictures/space on Facebook.
If not a network then a school library could use the groups application to create a group within the larger network of a location or school. On this group, library users could have a discussion board, use the wall (like on Facebook profile pages), and share photos and other content.
Through the library students could create Facebook groups for student organizations or their own special interests. Certainly they could do this outside of school as well, but with the support of the library, these groups could all be linked through the library's group page.
With the Questions application we could ask library related questions like "what is your favorite book?" or "What are you reading right now?" or "what did you have to read for school? Did you like it?" With these questions visible to and answerable by many users, a librarian could get a lot of feedback.
A librarian could also use the Polls application to ask a question to a certain demographic, either among, or outside of their own library's users.
With the Events application librarians could alert students about upcomming events in the library.
Photos and videos could be used and shared by students in the manner that photos and videos are often shared on the web, but with Facebook all of the content related to one library would be visible to all of the students and patrons of that library.
Just by looking at Profile pages a librarian could get to know a little more about his or her students and their interests.
There are several applications that allow users to share infomation about books.
Those students interested in programming could explore the potential of Facebook Platform and answer the question: What else could we make that a school library could use??

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Questions I Had

question: How much programming is involved in creating applications, really?

answer: Facebook markup language is based on Html, and supports flash, but, after that Zuckerman lost me. To get started, one can learn more on this page

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