It’s a Facebook World

Now I love me some Facebook. Apparently, I was an early adopter when it first opened up to UT students in Fall 2004. It’s been interesting to see it change over the years and become a *legitimate force in the social media world. In my opinion, it’s one of the best examples of both listening to your target audience and scanning the environment–two of the most important PR principles.

Last year, without warning Facebook released the mini-feed. That morning, thousands of college students logged on their favorite web site and literally went “WTF?” Within hours thousands of students joined groups petitioning for the return of their favorite hook-up site to the old way and used Facebooks tools against its creators.  Team Facebook responded by apologizing, inviting students to become part of their design team, and implementing stronger privacy controls (one of Facebook’s strengths).  Since then they’ve been much more upfront about changes.

A few months ago when I first signed up for Twitter, I commented on my Facebook profile that Twitter and Facebook need to team up. While they still need to get rid of the passive away message, Facebook went above and beyond that last week when they opened up the platform. Most of the applications are fluffy (dogstar and netflix queues?), but the possibilities are really amazing here. They’re leading the way in social media, however, they realize that the primary audience is still college students.

I’m sad that Obama is the only candidate to use this platform. However his campaign does have inside source with co-founder, Chris Hughes. I hope more campaigns release a similar application. That also brings up the issue of transparency. Should platforms such as Facebook operate from traditional media principles? (e.g. Where all the campaigns given the option of launching an application for their candidate before Facebook went live with these options or was Obama the only candidate because of Hughes’ connections?)

The Causes application is particularly exciting. A few months ago, nonprofit job was asked to sign on, so I got to play with Project Agape and set up our profile. While I’m not a fan of the name, it’s a great concept. It’ll be interesting to see how it takes off.

The popularity of this is pretty astounding. When I was playing with the WaPo’s The Compass today, I got this message:

We are currently experiencing a higher load than expected due to all the installs of The Compass. We’re glad people are using our app, but we need to move to new hardware to support the load.
Thanks for understanding, and thanks for your patience!
If you want to continue using The Compass, you can do so here, but please be aware that the app may not work so well until we upgrade our hardware.

I particuarly like the RSSbook. Facebook is quickly becoming the one-stop-shop for all web purposes. However, the price of that is privacy, but that deserves a larger discussion.

Facebook also seems to be the topic du jour right now. Lots of coverage at Social Media Club, TechRepublican, WSJ, Washington Post, techPresident, TechCrunch and many others.

Next up: Facebook vs. Google

*Facebook was created primarily to help college students hook up. Now that’s not how they sold it to schools, but it’s still an underlying principle and quickly became an integral part of college life. It’s been funny to watch professionals join and add legitimacy and political power to what remains the oracle of college drama.