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Facebook Gets It
Published on 27/05/07
by John Phillips
I’ve had a Facebook account for quite some time now. I was surprised that I didn’t find it before it became huge, but I didn’t really use it a ton when I first signed up. I thought it had some cool features here and there, but I never really became addicted to it. But over the past few months, the Facebook team has been doing some cool ass stuff which is hard not to pay attention to.
Now, I went from just sitting on the fence about Facebook, to really liking it. They are at the top of their game. And not just because of the stuff they’re adding, but for me being a designer/developer for the web, they still are at the top of their game. You can ask any real designer on this planet, and see what they think about MySpace. It will be the same across the board. So what Facebook is doing behind the scenes is top notch, and keeps me that much more interested.
I’m still poking through some of the new applications that they just launched on Friday, but there seem to be a few cool ones, and a few worthless ones. I really l like the new Facebook Marketplace too, and if I ever need to sell something, that’s one of the first places I’m going.
What else seems to be interesting is that with all these new additions to the site, it’s like they are going into direct competition with others like Craigslist and MySpace. I’ll be interested in seeing the affect that it has, not only on a global scale, but even with people I know who use those religiously. I, personally, use Craigslist quite a bit, but if Marketplace steps it up more, I have no problem putting Craigslist in the back seat.
Facebook seems to understand not only the people that use the network, but the right way to go about developing these easy-to-use features too. I like that, and it makes using Facebook so much better. To give a quick (and a little nerdy) example, earlier this year, Facebook revamped the comments to work a little better. So I left a message on Kell’s wall saying…
Yeah this is pretty cool. It reduces clicks!
Yes, that is a nerdy web designer thing to say, but it’s true. They do stuff like that to make using the site easier, which a lot of people don’t mention because, well, you only complain when something sucks or is poorly designed.
So yeah, Facebook seems to be doing a whole lot of things right, and making too much damn money doing it. I like the direction that they’re heading in though, and Mr. CEO’s goals are set pretty high…
But Facebook is thinking big. In the parlance of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the company is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet. It wants to sit at the center of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC — while improving its own prospects for a lucrative acquisition or an eventual public offering. Source
I plan on using Facebook and other sites that I use in the new version of this site that is set to launch sometime before 2009.
Peace