MEDIA MATTERS
Therefore I am
BY SEVANTI NINAN
|
While there may be many reasons to exist, Facebook seems to be one of the more compelling ones today.
|
PHOTO: H. VIBHU
Growing numbers: Online communities have become bigger than some countries.
GOT a child studying at an IIT, an IIM or at an university in the U.K. or the U.S.? Chances are that they are registered with Facebook. Blogging is rapidly becoming passé; the new Internet high is social networking. It is an idea that taps into a generation that wants to do its socialising on the computer. The number of registered users on Facebook.com is nine million, though it launched only in February 2004 on the Harvard University campus. Sixty per cent of these millions log on every day. Ask your kid about it and they will probably say matter of factly, as mine did: "If you are not on Facebook, you don't exist."
Changing nature
Media used to be about information and entertainment. Then blogging made it a site for personal publishing. Now it is a place to hang out. If you are a student you can network on Facebook, with others in your own school or college. If you are not, you can join its work networks. Earlier this month its makers decided to try and make it a force in the upcoming U.S. elections, even as the site announced that Facebook would soon be open to all Internet users. Its Election 2006 groups will enable users to discuss candidates and issues, find volunteers for candidates, and add their support to candidates who have Facebook profiles.
Because a winning idea takes no time at all to go global, Facebook now hosts networks on Indian campuses, though only at the IIMs and IITs so far.
So what do you do on Facebook? First, you announce to the world with your photograph that you exist. It claims to be the world's largest photo sharing site. Then you choose your friends. It allows today's contradictory generation, which wants to let it all hang out to have privacy at the same time. While all those nine million can see your name and face, only your friends can see your profile. The big thing about Facebook according to students one talked to, are its privacy features. (Wikipedia of course will give you the downside of these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook.) But if you are gregarious you can write to people and ask to join their friends lists, ending up with hundreds of "friends" all you know about whom is what they say about themselves on their profile. Friendship as instant as coffee.
Any new Net invention proceeds to quickly acquire both personal and professional features. Social networking is different from chat and email in the sense that it allows you to announce your professional needs to your entire university or college and wait for someone to respond. MySpace, the big daddy of social networking sites, founded in July 1993, turned out to be a boon for independent professionals who could upload films, songs and pictures of their artwork directly on to their profile, finding themselves both an audience and a market.
As for personal uses, you can write on the "wall" of a friend who has lost her telephone if you need to contact her. The site sends you an email notification when someone writes on your wall. All those students with laptops in their backpacks on Wi-Fi campuses seem to be more or less permanently logged on, so you can get through to someone quite fast. Seems a bit circuitous — one would imagine it would be simpler to send them an email saying the same thing. But possibly less trendy. And believe it or not, a valued personal feature is that you can mourn on Facebook when a registered user dies, by leaving condolence messages on that individual's pages.
Online populations
Facebook, with nine million users, claims to be seventh most trafficked site on the Web. But Net statistics need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Because at the same time, Hi5, with 40 million users, only claims to be the eighth most visited U.S. social network. And MySpace, which has its own internal email system, claims to be the world's fourth most popular English-language website, the sixth most popular website in any language, and to have a 100 million users. But however conservatively you look at it, we are talking of socially networked populations as large as entire countries, big or small.
Advertisers love that, but, as with all bright ideas on the Net, success means imitation, and perhaps imitation so good that you could lose your business as instantly as you gained it. Google cottoned to the same idea with Orkut in 2004, an invitation-only site. America Online is getting ready to challenge Facebook and MySpace with its own social networking venture. That success can be ephemeral is illustrated by the experience of Friendster, which went from 20 million visitors/ users in 2003 to less than a million in 2005. And when the traffic shifts so does advertising.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
