Dealing with Facebook time
I come back to the usual massive amount of non-essential email, which I weed out with block deletes, and, interestingly, a serious amount of Facebook action. In the last two weeks I have received dozens of friend invites (not from college students), messages and all kinds of 'friendly' updates and pokes from the people in my 'network.'
In addition, some of my new friends don't really want to be friends--more like associates, who are using Facebook to send me PR pitches, just as they do via traditional email. Not unexpected. Like water flowing, social networking is sometimes about filling space, meandering into places where you may not want it.
However, most people want to share some details about their lives, interests, whereabouts and activities, and to align with groups of shared interest or background in virtual space.
Facebook is blessed with good timing, and opened to the masses with a clean, intuitive interface and a now popular application platform. It's a centrally controlled platform, a walled garden, but that hasn't stopped more than a hundred thousand people a day from joining the club.
The result of all this Facebook activity is what could be called Facebook Time, or FaceTime, which is the amount of time spent engaged with Facebook per day.
Face Time coefficient: number of friends + number of applications used/time spent per day = FaceTime.
And as we know now, time spent is the new page view.
Minutes or hours of time spent on a social network isn't new for the MySpace (which far outpaces Facebook on unique users and time spent metrics) and pre-unleashed Facebook generation. Less TV.
But for those of us who have used email, or even LinkedIn or Xing, as our social network, keeping up with activity on Facebook can be time consuming, even a addiction that is funneled into the Blackberry/Treo/iPhone. Managing the flood of data from multiple email services, devices and social networks becomes a matter of prioritization.
Facebook is not yet a replacement for other email services, but it's a natural next step for Facebook to improve its skeletal email application.
If Facebook were to integrate feeds and widgets, and allow for user created tabs, with the ease of Netvibes, Pageflakes, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others, it could become even more of a hub. Currently, each feed or widget, such as the ZDNet Blogs feed, is treated as a separate Facebook app that must be individually loaded.
Facebook is getting lots of feedback about how it could allow users to have more control of their data and social graphs. Plaxo, for example, is turning its contact information hub that offers multi-way sync of contacts and calendar between various services from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Apple, Mozilla, and mobile phones.
As Marc Canter says, "But we've got a long way to go before we can truly open up social networking. All sorts of social-networking APIs will be implemented by different vendors--and we need a way to map these APIs together and create some sort of normalized world--where friends, profile pages, groups and messages all can line up and be compatible with each other."
See also:
Dennis Howlett: Build ERP on social media: not a joke Thomas Otter: Facebook and the law Jeremiah Owyang-- All your widgets belong to Facebook