The Facebook Metropolis

Okay, so you’ve got your Facebook page…and maybe you have a MySpace page?  And maybe you’ve also got a LinkedIn page, a Twitter page, and a Flickr page too?

Social Network sites are like friends.  All of us have a finite amount of time and energy to spend online, and even less time to devote to any particular website.

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, maybe you can only really have 40 friends?  (And if you’re Jerry Seinfeld, you only have three?) The same applies to social networking sites.  Although MySpace officially still has the most U.S. users, it seems that Facebook will overtake it soon--if it hasn’t already.  And once it does, it is very likely that those same MySpace users will largely abandon their sites and become full-time Facebookers.  The reasons are many:

Facebook has attracted a larger percentage of the over-30 crowd than any social network site before it.  Facebook is easy on the eyes, it’s fun (with over 30,000 add-on applications), it’s not hard to set up your own page, and they nailed the photo-sharing aspects of the site.  It’s already got over 26 million U.S. users, and hasn’t come close to peaking yet because people who never tried social network sites before are being led to it.

Back in the 90’s, I played a multiplayer online game called Ultima Online.  Part of the fascination of the game was the sheer volume of people playing it.  The game’s economy and range of experiences were enhanced by its huge, 24-hour-a-day, worldwide game-playing population.  It actually had it’s own culture.  A couple years back (feeling nostalgic) I tried it again.  By this time the game’s online population had dwindled to such low numbers that it was immediately obvious the experience would never be what it used to be.  Facebook beats other social networking sites because of its sheer numbers of active users as well.  Even if you find sites like Bebo and hi5 to be newer and hipper than Facebook, it’s likely you’ll still spend more time on Facebook because that’s where the people—including your friends, co-workers, and family—still are.  Another good example of this phenomena is eBay.  There might be better commerce sites out there, but eBay is still the #1 choice because of its volume of buyers and sellers.

That’s not to say there aren’t some other monster social networking sites out there, but they’re not pure social networking sites either.  YouTube is a favorite of mine, as is Twitter, and LinkedIn.  I’m also a fan of Wikipedia, Digg, and have dabbled into Flickr.  While these sites are all great, they’re all niche sites.  They all do what they do very well, but don’t provide the complete range of social experiences that Facebook offers.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “The metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London, or Tokyo.” What might be true for big cities isn’t necessarily true for social media, and Facebook is a great example of that.