In the October 20 edition, the Economist wades in to the social graph discussion, declaring “There’s less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye.” Ouch. But there’s something refreshing about the Economist’s measured point of view. From the article:
How much of this is hype? Facebook has made two genuine breakthroughs. The first was its decision to let outsiders write programs and keep all the advertising revenues these might earn. This has led to all kinds of widgets, from the useful (comparing Facebookers’ music and film tastes, say) to the inane (biting each other to become virtual zombies). The entire internet industry reckons this was clever and is planning to copy it. This week MySpace said it would open its site to outside programmers. Google, which owns Orkut, a social network extremely popular in Brazil and parts of Asia, is expected to do the same soon. Facebook’s second masterstroke is its “mini-feed”, an event stream on user pages that keeps users abreast of what their friends are doing—uploading photos, adding a widget and so on. For many users, this is addictive and is the main reason they log on so often. Jerry Michalski, a consultant, calls the mini-feed a “data exhaust” that gives Facebook users “better peripheral vision” into the lives of people they know only casually. This mini-feed is so far the clearest example of using the social graph in a concrete way.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
Interesting there is no authorship on this article !
Did AOL or Yahoo write it ! ?
odd…
The Economist doesn’t use bylines.
Have you seen this:
http://www.patrickruffini.com/2007/10/26/the-early-adopter-effect/
Similar to what you did a couple of years ago, but taking advantage of the new openness of FB.