Facebook is twitterific
I hate to talk so much about Facebook, but given its sheer size (200 million worldwide users and growing) and control of the social graph, it is simply the most relevant entity in the social web. The company is quickly approaching a critical period in its evolution— establishment of a sound business model— and the rest of the web waits with bated breath to examine the results and implications. As such, it’s no surprise that it recently overhauled its design again, adding a new kind of functionality that alters the dynamic of what Facebook can accomplish.
I read a recent piece by Joshua Porter that hits the nail on the head as far as Facebook’s most recent strategy moves are concerned— Facebook is going asymmetric, allowing users to maintain a unidirectional “follow” relationship with any other user.
Facebook will grow their service by allowing people to accrue attention in a way they can’t currently in the system. People will realize the same benefits they currently do on Twitter…you can actually start to have an audience that is larger than your current friends list. In other words, this will allow members of Facebook to have a much larger reach than they could before…thus giving Facebook a larger reach as well. This will be the next big growth spurt for Facebook, who has executed so well on almost everything they’ve done so far…but at the present moment the structure of the system prevents this from happening.
Is this a good move? I believe so. The most salient point in that article to me was how an asymmetric model allows you to track & measure attention. I think we are moving towards attention as an underlying web currency (in a social network you could also call it “social capital”), and while we currently do not know how to monetize it, it’s pretty clear that any structure of a web business model will revolve around the attention metric (even assuming that traditional web advertising is not a sustainable model, a topic recently discussed by TechCrunch and The Economist, attention will still be the key component to leverage).
I do think they are taking a risk in trying to mold user behaviors— away from a more real-world-like symmetric friendship model into a more online-only asymmetric follower model. If anything though, I think Twitter is showing that this type of model is a great way for friends to interact. As a social tool, I get a TON of more value out of following real-word friends on Twitter than I do being their friends on Facebook. While this may not be the case for many of Facebook’s users, Facebook benefits from making this move open-ended. The site maintains its core offering- a communication utility for friends that emphasizes public wall communication and photo sharing, while at the same time diversifying the type of experience its users can get by adopting the real-time status updates model. While I personally won’t use Facebook for the latter, as a matter of choice, I’m already so invested in Facebook’s original product that I will not stop using it (all my real world friends use it, upload their pictures on it, etc.).
Facebook almost seems to benefit from this new type of ambiguity it’s established among its users. Is it a pseudo-news reader where you can go to get interesting links from friends, or is it a social utility where you can get frequent life updates from friends and communicate with them sporadically? Does it even matter what it is as long as you keep using it?
I see the site as entering a strange experimental phase that I think will bear out some fascinating results and drive a more focused product strategy in the next 6-8 months. Again, this stage will prove vital in establishing Facebook as a sound business entity rather than just a dominant social network.
