So back in the summer when we were working on the GM youth portal the idea of advertising on facebook came up, that and flavor of the year myspace. When I did my research into facebook I was met with the inability to register since I was no longer in school. At the time you needed to be a current student, with a student email address. A short month later I was contacted by the facebook team with a message telling me I was allowed to register with a non acedemic email address and that I was welcome aboard. I signed up that day and low and behold my company wasn’t in the database so I entered it to be registered.
A few weeks later I check back to see if others I had told had signed up for facebook, there was one singular person from my company on facebook, once they were added my facebook account stayed stagnent for a long while. By late november I had a few more friends added from maclaren but nothing too big round 4 or 5.
Fast forward to about 1 month ago, I started to get emails with friend requests from the girls at the dance studio. Looks like facebook had hit the teen sceen, and while I was all for adding these people I knew they really wern’t the classmates I was hoping to find on facebook. a short week later and I got my first old friend from highschool, was facebook finally hitting the everyday internet surfer? Yes, yes it was. In the last two weeks I’ve overheard and joined in conversations about facebook on the go train. Re-kindeled friendships that were broken up when i didnt go off to university like 95% of my classmates and left messages on the walls of people I havent talked to in 10 plus years. TO me its surprising that facebook took so long to reach the masses when its a really simple and powerful tool.
Unlike classmates that charge you, facebook is free to everybody which is great. Not only that but its got some great simple tools that make reaching back to friends really simple. Couple that with some great photo tools, (no flickr integration sadly) the ability to integrate your own RSS feed from an outside source to populate your blog and a generally easy to use navigation and content structure and you’ve got a great online tool that brings people together, simply and effectivley.
kudos to you facebook a job done well.