Thursday, July 19, 2007
Facebook Moves to the Business World
byAs Sarah recently wrote, the emergence of Facebook is certainly one of the year’s biggest online stories – both for its incredible growth and its potential as an acquisition target by a media conglomerate.
Facebook is gaining impressive traction among adults and within the business world. A Time columnist noted its appeal (and stickiness) to all ages:
…you can see the potential of an online world arranged to emphasize the doings and opinions of those who matter to you most. You can see the pitfalls too, mainly in defining who matters. In the world of Facebook, friends don’t drift apart. Either someone makes an active break, or the connection and the News Feeds go on forever. Get used to it.
Eric Kintz of HP is drawn to the site’s marketing potential: the ability to form special interest groups, the viral nature of the site, and the possibilities created by opening the site to developers. (According to Kintz, more than 1,300 HP employees joined Facebook in May alone.)
As Shel Holtz noted recently on For Immediate Release, organizations may want to consider adopting Facebook instead of creating their own homegrown social networks. If employees already use Facebook to collaborate on work-related matters, why should the company interfere or establish a subpar internal site? It has even led to discussions about whether an employer could claim your profile as intellectual property.
Facebook still needs to prove its long-term staying power, however. Social Computing Magazine has developed a growth model that Web 2.0 ventures have followed: initial buzz, self-sustaining growth, meteoric growth, the peak, a plateau of ubiquity, an inevitable decline. It’ll be exciting to see if Facebook can break the pattern.
