Comments on: wasted potential: facebook

By: How to Get Six Pack Fast

How to Get Six Pack Fast — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:48:05 +0000

My fellow on Facebook shared this link and I’m not dissapointed at all that I came to your blog.

By: LolaJRS

LolaJRS — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:36:38 +0000

While I agree with some points of Jonathan’s post, I perhaps take issue with this:

“Provide platforms for multimedia: Go one step past YouTube and merge membership with art, thereby creating user-controlled channels for original music, video, and audio works. Make Facebook the brand that excludes professional art; make it the tool for everyone else to use.”

I am not sure I fully understand the distinction he is making. Isn’t Myspace and now, Facebook oftentimes a holding tank for those making the transition from indie to popular? I suppose I could also make the same case for businesses and personalities? Isn’t the end goal for so many monetization? Where does one draw the lines?

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:33:03 +0000

http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/the-art-of-life-in-the-age-of-digital-reproduction.html and the linked Gould article might be interesting fodder for further reading on these issues.

By: Marti Barletta

Marti Barletta — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:53:13 +0000

Jonathan – At last!! A voice of sanity who tells it like it is! I couldn’t agree more, obviously. I think these social media sites are going to continue to proliferate and proponents will continue to hyperventilate until the whole thing collapses under its own self-importance. The marketing and media communities have gone gaga over the so-called “potential” of these new platforms, apparently oblivious to the excessive time-suck factor and minimal content-to-noise ratio.

Last week someone published a review of the “Top 40 brands on Twitter” (http://tinyurl.com/8bkoxp) – and some of them had barely 100 followers! I don’t care if they had 100 times that, those numbers are still miniscule – negligible! – relative to any traditional medium.

I appreciated that your commentary took the trouble to make four excellent suggestions for Facebook to add value to itself. That’s the sort of thinking I am seeing none of in all this overblown hyperbabble. Good for you for bringing a strategic eye and the voice of the consumer to this discussion!

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:03:21 +0000

Jonathan – this is an interesting post. I see social network sites as a disruptive technology. They leverage the way things have gone before, but they also create new behaviors that combine a range of function and meaning. I get the feeling that your disdain for the world of “numbnuts” is leading you to discard any value you don’t find beneficial. I’m glad you don’t forward stupid jokes any more, but does that mean that email has ceased to be valuable to you as a tool? I’m glad that you are over your retro infatuation with old music, but does that mean you don’t use iTunes (or your app of choice) any longer?

Facebook has many applications and capabilities and is being used by many people in many different ways. I suspect if you worked past the curmudgeon pose you might see those uses and the associated benefits. I’ll put forward one – it lowers the barriers to incidental communication and that incidental communication can have meaningful, substantive consequences.

An example from my personal life: we’re friends with a couple and are all linked on Facebook. They have cats. We have a dog. They posted a picture of a dog and we both wondered “who is this dog?” and sent a few messages back and forth about the dog. A few weeks later, another dog picture and a joking “we and our dog are coming to get you” which led to – all mediated by facebook – an invitation to get together face to face and be dog owners and walkers together. We have made plans with these folks sporadically over the past few years, we love hanging out, and like so many social things, we just don’t get to do it, for all the reasons people fail to complete things they want to do. But Facebook provided another channel for interacting in a way that led to a powerful side effect: a fun day together (oh, and we each posted our photos of the event to Facebook that afternoon, thereby feeding energy back into the system that helped us get together).

Could we have got together without Facebook? Of course. Would we? Not for a while longer.

I don’t know if that’s sustainable, I don’t know how it will change, but a change is happening right now, day by day, and it’s exciting. And many of us are indeed finding relevance. Without zombie bites and crap like that.

As far as the brand, Facebook has failed to own the App Store-like branding opportunity that Apple has claimed. It’s a platform that includes a huge number of different functions, some of which have very strong brands of their own (Scrabulous, anyone?), but how do they position themselves successfully as a platform? Note that the insanely extensive configurability those applications afford is related to the previous point of people using it in many different ways.