Roy Martin said at May 4th, 2007 at 9:38pm

Welcome to the revolution! Facebook really is what myspace should have been..

I’d still like to see some cool things added such as a buddyping type of module, but maybe for the future.

Frankie Roberto said at May 4th, 2007 at 10:47pm

Facebook is pretty non-geeky actually, and has arisen through hyper-connected university networks. The ‘notes’ feature must be one of the least-used, and I think you’re the first person I’ve noticed that uses the auto-import feature.

The most interesting feature of Facebook is the way that it has recognised the dominant activity as being checking out what you’re friends are up to, and then made this really easy and prominent with the ‘news feed’. The result is that people (not me) spend literally hours checking up on what their friends, classmates, ex-friends, ex-lovers, etc are up to.

One of the other main activities is also the groups, which because of the news feed can go from one member to 1 million in literally ten days, making it a hugely reactive community.

Not sure how far it has spread outside of Universities yet, but within Universities it must have a saturation rate of nearly 100% of students, which is pretty extraordinary.

Frankie
P.S It’s Facebook, not FaceBook – another difference from MySpace :-)

Ian Deeley said at May 5th, 2007 at 9:39am

The beauty of it is that you can remain relatively anonymous to the wider web unless they have been accepted as your friend, unlike Myspace and its clunky approach.

On the subject of clunky approaches and un-intuitive design, has anyone endured 4oD yet?

Adam Lynch said at May 5th, 2007 at 1:12pm

I see you accepted my invite to facebook. As you’ve probably learn’t can be alot more selective to whom you allow as a friend, of course Myspace allows this option, but facebook is closed.

I’ve been on facebook for the last few months now and have enjoyed finding people i’ve known along the way, its great to how you are able to stay in touch with people and finally chat to people that you’ve not seen in a while. Once you find one person, you find them all. You can attach yourself to various networks, I’m not sure if Virgin Radio has one, but there is certainly a BBC network, which by the looks of things has a lot of members.

I think Facebook suits people who like a simple interface and can move around without many problems, unlike Myspace which can often slow your computer down due to the over use of odd html useage.

Glad you like it!

Tim Carr said at May 5th, 2007 at 7:26pm

If you’ve not tried it already James, the Facebook API (REST based) is bloody brilliant. There are various classes written for PHP, Python, .NET, Cocoa etc – and it’s really easy to build a web site that uses Facebook. I built a small notifications app in .NET, and given the fact I don’t know much .NET, it was pretty easy to interface with Facebook.

Paul Smith said at May 6th, 2007 at 3:50pm

This isn’t right. You mean to say I caught onto Facebook before you?

Seriously?

That doesn’t seem right.

I feel quite warm and a little smug about it :)

Helen Blaby said at May 8th, 2007 at 11:30am

Can someone explain to me, in very simple language, how it all works. Can I stop the people who only log on to the internet to be rude about me (cos obviously this happens a lot…) from actually knowing I’m on there?

Martin Deutsch said at May 8th, 2007 at 9:45pm

Helen: Yes. The privacy settings are hugely configurable, and you can set it so that only people who you’ve added as friends can find you and see your profile.

I occasionally play around MySpace, and it still astounds me that News Corp spent so much money on it, and they still can’t afford a decent coder. It’s obviously hugely popular, but it’s still bobbins and never seems to work properly.