The only thing more devastating to teenager than limiting access to Facebook might just be the loss of their cell phone. It’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. In just a few years, one application has gone from innovative novelty to near necessity. But not just for teenagers.
Nearly all of my friend requests on Facebook in the last six months came from people who read The Last Track. That’s something I never expected.
Then again, I also never expected Facebook and social networking to get so big. At present more than 500 million people have Facebook accounts. Some days more people access Facebook than Yahoo or Google. Let me repeat that. A single destination draws more traffic than the biggest search engines that help people sift through billions of active web sites. That’s beyond impressive. And staggering.
It also makes me wonder what’s next for the social networking juggernaut. Maybe just more of the same.
Or maybe something even bigger.
Have you created a fan page for The Last Track? Or for Sam Hilliard?
Having one of those pages makes it easier to manage your fans rather than having them mixed in with your friends and cluttering your friend feed.
I totally agree about social networking taking the world by storm. When myspace first got huge, I thought that was going to be the end of it… it would buckle under it’s incredible mass of blinged up profiles and terrible AlTErnAtInG CaPS text and just collapse into itself, creating a cyberblackhole and just going away entirely. I guess not. Facebook saved social networks.
The thing I noticed about facebook recently is that it actually can be as much of a necessity as email. Some people use facebook exclusively as their communication medium. Facebook acts as an addressbook (not everyone posts their contact information or mailing address on their profile, but it would be nice if they did sometimes), email, instant messaging, blog, photo album, gaming platform and more. The addressbook/mail/IM aspect, in my opinion, is the killer app. No longer does one need to keep track of their friend’s email addresses. No longer does one need to ask for their friends screen name. It’s all right there. If the person is on facebook (which, if they’re by a computer, they probably are in some tab burried in their browser), they’re ready to be IM’d.
To some, there is no reason to visit the rest of the web. Facebook is the be all end all platform.
Just think, one day you might be forced to create a fan page for yourself because you’ll be reaching your friends limit.
I’m actually not surprised that social networking has become so big. That’s one thing that the Internet has always had going for itself – the ability to create a niche for anything. And a niche on the internet could be millions of people. The idea that other people are interested in the same thing as you and wish to connect over that common interest is what makes the whole concept of social networking justify itself. It’s a great means of sharing information. Especially in terms of publicity.
@spike, no fan page for either Last Track or Sam Hilliard yet. When there’s enough traction I’ll do so. Right now, feed clutter is more a product of application updates some friends feel compelled to advertise, rather than extraneous friends.
Facebook definitely turned the Myspace train wreck around before chasing away the broader audience. And yes, another few years of thirteen year olds at the wheel and it would have imploded before hitting critical mass. Truly the Book is the killer app, a piece of transformational technology that comes once a generation. I might be old fashioned, but I still keep contact information for all the people who matter in my life offline, though it is handy to contact them through Facebook.
@Cyndy, let’s hope the day for a fan page comes sooner rather than later. Publicity and the Internet. Ah, I’m still trying to navigate that one.