facebookjunkie.net

Facebook Smayshbook! …. What’s all the fuss about Facebook?

If you have arrived here hoping to learn more about Facebook and whether it can work for your personal or professional purposes, then I pledge to give you good information and my honest opinions on several aspects of this wondrous Internet facility. As opinions go, they are generally worth the price you pay for them and this is a free resource. I won’t always be flattering in my appraisal of Facebook and the uses people make of it, but I will attempt to present balanced perspectives intended to generate discussion and inform visitors of the various dimensions of topic areas.

The Facebook excitement factor is the 2007 equivalent of AOL’s deep voiced “You’ve Got Mail”. Only this time Facebook tells you that you have been poked, hugged, kissed, gifted, notified, befriended or tagged.

No one can seriously deny that Facebook is a remarkable social media platform and a phenomenon that is generating a firestorm of interest and activity; especially in recent months. It has attracted significant media attention, as well as corporate and parental concern. The history of this social network will be chronicled for years to come.

Facebook and its siblings in the social media network crowd provide a useful DIY facility for personal web publishing. People have things to say and these facilities let them say it, effectively lowering the bar for those who would not otherwise have a noticeable existence on the net. They allow the massses to say “yes I’m here, I’m connected, I  have joined the ranks of the electronically involved”.

Facebook has parents squirming, corporate America revisiting their online acceptable use policies, entrepreneurs looking to exploit the platform for profit and users….. well that’s a whole different story.

Millions of users (40M +  and counting) seem to be in an absolute feeding frenzy on this wildly popular site. Personally, I try not to think of the huge productivity hit that businesses and organizations are taking as the result of on-the-job “facepainting”. TechBlorge cites a recent survey claiming that UK firms are losing more than £130 million a day from their employees who are supposed to be working and not wasting time visiting social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook, or MySpace. The calculations are based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies and suggested that some employees spend up to two hours a day visiting social networking sites at employers’ expense.

Is Facebook the next Microsoft? Some think so and some liken the Facebook computing platform to an operating system - a social operating system. It does exhibit many of the attributes of an O/S. 

For application developers, Facebook offers a handy container complete with rules and standards. More importantly, Facebook applications have a ready audience in the tens of millions of users thirsty for the next fun social experience. With Facebook Inc holding most of the winning cards, however, some are questioning whether giving away the farm to Facebook is a wise business decision just to find a convenient place to launch your killer app. 

I look at Facebook as a well organized service that is attractive to build upon. The ready audience and the application development ‘hooks’ provide a considerable jump start to many application developers who would not be able to launch their product otherwise.

Facebookjunkie.net offers opinion, analysis and assistance to those trying to sort out fact from fiction in the the myriad of debate areas surrounding this bigger than life Internet facility.

To help readers sort out posts according to interest areas look for posts in specific categories, as follows:

     Blog Category               What you will find there

• just face the facts     general commentary on what Facebook is 
                                       and isn’t

• funny face                  the funny side of what people use Facebook for
• money face               posts on making money off joy-riding on the
                                       Facebook platform

• techy face                  posts on the IT technical side of the Facebook
                                       platform

• face painting             posts regarding day to day usage
                                       characteristics on Facebook

• egg on my face         when I have to eat crow for saying something
                                       wrong

• face lift                        ways in which Facebook may be enhancing the 
                                      internet experience

• face first                     ways in which Facebook applications, groups or
                                      individuals have failed (some miserably) in 
                                      delivering on their intended goals

• facethemusic         ways in which Facebook applications, groups or
                                      individuals have used Facebook to enhance
                                      members’ musical enjoyment