Random Sequence

Edinburgh Coffee Morning Facebook Discussion

An interesting Coffee Morning today. I had a discussion with Mike about Facebook and who it’s for - I agree the demographic targeting for marketing purposes is second to none but I’m still unconvinced that the actual product is useful to me. Mike thinks Facebook’s rise is only the beginning and we should see it as a ‘personal newspaper’, feeding you updates on all of your friends.

I think everything Facebook does is do-able elsewhere on the web - I like like using the different sites / services for the one thing they do well - Flickr for photographs, del.icio.us for my bookmarks, Twitter for right-now microblogging and so on. Through a feed reader I can pool this together and keep up with my own and my friends’1 online activities without much fuss.

But then I know what a feed reader is and I’ve enjoyed checking out up the various services as they emerged, one at a time. I know how to make websites and set-up a blog - I almost find Facebook patronising2.

Most people aren’t as geeky as I am, and most people don’t have any of these services set up. In that case, Facebook is a great place to start. I should be pleased that more people are bring their lives online - that’s where my business is.

  1. Only applies to friends who are similarly geeky.
  2. It means talking down to people. (Jimmy Carr)