Is Facebook really web 3.0?

One of the most interesting events of this year has been the explosion of registered users with Facebook after they opened their site beyond schools and universities. Most importantly we have seen a lot of young (and not so young) professionals flooding the pages of Facebook at the expense of other social networking sites like Linkedin.
Could it be a coincidence that my Linkedin connections dropped dramatically in the last 6 months whereas my Facebook friend requests went through the roof? Probably, but I believe there is something interesting to all this.

First, networking is important, especial for professionals, and should be fun too. Linkedin only goes so far. I can update my profile on Linkedin every time I get a promotion or change job but that doesn’t happen everyday (or multiple times a day).
Facebook instead tells all my “friends” every time I change my status, add a new friend or interact with an application (more on applications later). This feature, also known as News feed is what made a few people mad at the beginning (they just didn’t like that their friends knew how they were spending time on Facebook) but also created a lot of returning users, multiple times a day. It’s a bit like web mail, we go back multiple times a day to see what is up with our friends.

Interestingly enough we now know a lot more about our “friends”, we not only know where they work but we also know that they are “having lunch with analysts”, “bracing themselves for a crazy week”, “en route to civilization”, “loving Randy Moss”, “curiously fulfilled by a weekend of making flatpack furniture”. Facebook really adds a new dimension to our friends universe and it’s what I call the “everyday dimension”. A lot of my Facebook friends are people that I met through my job and that I don’t usually spend a lot of time with outside work. But through Facebook I can see what their mood is and what they like every day, I can get to know them better without necessarily spending time socializing with them directly. It’s more like socialization without interaction.

I never really understood (and liked) MySpace because every page I visited looked completely different from the previous one and things didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand if “Chicken Little” was the name of a person, a pet, a band, a group… It’s the name of a girl in Nevada in case you are wondering.

The big debate going on today is if Facebook is better than MySpace or not. I don’t care, I know that I won’t be hanging out in MySpace and probably most of the people that I want to network with are not either (and if they are I’d rather not know). In Facebook people use their own identity for the most part and that’s a big step forward in creating a more real relationship.

Another important event for Facebook this year was opening their platform for other developers to build applications on top of it. There are a few success stories out there of web sites that didn’t really have a lot of traffic and after they decided to offer a Facebook applications they saw their traffic skyrocket. A lot of digital companies have their Facebook app, you can find the usual suspects like Amazon, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us and many more followed by a lot of simple (and sometimes silly) apps built in a day buy a PHP developer mostly for fun.
The idea of providing open APIs for developers to do this is very cool, the execution has a lot of room for improvements. A lot of time I try to use some of the applications that are installed and the only thing I get back is an error.

The state of where we are with social network sites reminds of what we had many years ago with instant messaging. We used the one where most of our friends were. Some of us started with AOL and then moved to MSN and Yahoo!. Finally Trillian came along and we didn’t have to worry about which IM client to use anymore. Soon somebody (please Google?) will come up with a nice way to integrate all these social networks and we will all sleep better once again.

Not all is great in Facebook today but for people in the industry like us is definitely a good start. As stated buy Scoble:

Because there isn’t anything better. It’s like why we are so gaga over the iPhone. The iPhone is locked up tight and doesn’t let us play. But it is so superior to the alternatives that we’ll put up with all the walls. I’ve seen this play out before, though. Remember in 1989? Apple had the Macintosh II and was way ahead of any other platform. They ended up with, what, five percent market share because a more open platform steamrolled over them.