I’ve got another request to be added as a friend on Facebook. I joined Facebook last year. Now I have 66 friends so far. I do couple of checks everyday on Facebook and even get updated through SMS on my cellphone. According to the website itself,
Facebook launched in February of 2004 and the website now has over 19 million active users across over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate and high school networks
Here are few things I like about this social network website:
- People are real.
Everyone on Facebook has to get either a college email or a work email in order to register, where obtaining the college or work email is already an identification process per se. Therefore people to be added are not just a ID or nickname. This is very much different from forum like communities. - Efficient user classification.
There are two types of classifications on Facebook, which are networks and groups. The concept of network is pretty much like community in expo.live.com, that only people with specific email can be in the network defined by the domain of that email. Whereas for groups, which are less formal than networks, people can join together by interests or purely no topic. - Extensibility
Facebook provides a light library of APIs for developers to re-use the existing information. Any Facebook application redirect the user to the authentication gateway on the official site. After user is identified, the application runs on the third-party website or client computer can obtain necessary information of that user, such as friends list, to do something like Friends Visualizer .
But, Facebook does not really rock. It just manages the friend list in an interesting way. What I can’t imagine, is that if someone can come up with a combination of all three websites: Facebook, Douban (see previous post) and expo.live.com. That will be interesting.
BTW, the support of international characters in Facebook takes points off a lot.