I just finished building a Facebook application. It was an interesting experience and I got to help out a friend.

Going through the process made me think about social sites and what makes them good and what makes them bad and how that applies to Facebook.

I think that Facebook was probably an interesting and useful site at some point in the past, back when it was a community site for something. That was back when it was the place you could catch up with your buddies from college, the people in the same class as you. Facebook was a community site for catching up with your friends from university and so everyone there had something in common. Community, common, there’s an important shared root there.

I understand flickr, it’s a community site for people who want to share and appreciate photography. I understand threadless, it is a community site for people who love great t-shirts. I understand last.fm, it is a community site for people who love music and want to discover new music.

What the hell is Facebook for now that it isn’t a community site for people who went to uni together? It feels like a community site for people who wonder what the hell a community site is… and that feeling of wonder is going to wear off pretty quickly once everyone they know wants to turn them into a zombie or a pirate.

Right now Facebook is a pretty good way of “meeting up” with people you haven’t caught up with in a while but it is a completely retarded way of communicating with the people that you talk to all the time. The former has some value but that may last only as long as Facebook is the hot, hot thing and everyone is there. Friendster was the same a while ago and I suppose MySpace took over from them.

Community sites that add value are centered around something that people hold in common and Facebook, by opening itself to applications and the untold millions, might have managed to dilute its commons to the point that it may as well be a smaller and more retarded version of the Internet at large, at that point the web wins like it did against with AOL’s walled garden.

Or perhaps they will become the next Google and we will all have to bow and scrape at Zuckerberg’s feet.

I think that I have more to say around how opening Facebook up to applications might help kill it for people but 400 words on this is way too sad as it is.

Your thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.