I spend a lot of time using the internet. Between the web, instant messaging, email and VOIP, it must add up into the tens of hours every week. While traversing the various pages, people and websites that I commonly wander, one site has become more common recently - Facebook.
I’ve used a lot of social networking websites in the past - Yahoo 360, MySpace, Orkut, LiveJournal, Wallop, Bebo… you name it. None has been as good as Facebook - and there is a simple reason why.
The design of Facebook discourages people from adopting false identities. Everybody seems to be going by their real name, and real location. Because a critical mass has done that, there are very few people on Facebook abusing the system - because nobody will add them as contacts. To make things even better, you not only mark somebody as a friend on Facebook - you give a context to that friendship - partner, friend, colleague, and even more detail on top of that - when and how you met.
The design of the Facebook site is a victory for function and form over style. Everything is clean, tidy, and easy to find. You can upload unlimited photographs, and yourself and your friends can tag the people in those photos. Everything requires confirmation in these cross-people operations, so abuse cannot happen.
If you write a blog elsewhere, it can be sucked into Facebook via the “Notes” feature, meaning that friends using facebook will see your new blog posts when they login. If you’re as much of a tech head as me, you’ll use your Jaiku RSS feed for that - so all you blogs, twitters, and Flickr photos get piped into Facebook in one go.
On top of the basic social group aspects of Facebook, you can join “networks” - usually location related (e.g. the “London” network), and “groups” - such as “Apple Macbook Users”. Networks and groups provide discussion forums and walls to post messages for other members to see when they walk past. You can start your own group on whatever you want.
If you click on the screenshot above you can wander over to my Facebook profile. Feel free to add me as a friend (if you know me), and I’ll say hello in return.