The 25 things meme on Facebook has garnered a good bit of press coverage lately. I spoke to Pat Reardon of the Chicago Tribune about the phenomenon:
This reciprocity is a new, more democratic wrinkle in the autobiography game, especially useful on Facebook, where a “friend” isn’t necessarily someone you know well. These notes help friends learn about one another. In addition, they address a problem that has long plagued an American society in which people often move from one place to another.
Stutzman points out that many people older than 25 are using Facebook and these 25-things notes to reconnect with people from their past. These short autobiographies can provide a quick overview of the writer’s life.
“Maybe Facebook is filling a need we’ve never been able to fill before, enabling reconnection with the people we left behind,” he says.
Among recent adopters of Facebook, reconnection is a dominant activity. As compared to college adopters who connect with their existing friend networks, older users are using Facebook to reconnect with friends they’ve left behind during life transitions. In a sense, Facebook is enabling an ongoing virtual class reunion for recent joiners, something Classmates.com has long used as a profit center.
Regardless of age or recency of adoption, it is my opinion that social information gathering is a core activity driving use of a network. College students use Facebook to conduct a fleshing-out of the identities of people they are meeting (i.e., they’re background checking new friends). Recent, older adopters are engaging in the same behavior – they’re just fleshing out the last 25 years in which they didn’t keep contact with the connected individual. Seeing pictures of the kids, reading the life story – these informational motives for use are just as strong among older users as they are among college students. At the center of this phenonenon is a core social motive – people care about one another, and want to learn about/engage with one another. Social networks afford us new ways to address this social motive at computational scale.
This analysis begs the question: what happens when we’ve reconnected with everyone? As I wrote last year, Facebook is riding a network cascade, in which a certain segment of the population is incented to create a profile and articulate connections in the network. Facebook can expect months of solid growth, and users can expect ongoing stimulation as individuals further out in their social networks reach out for reconnection (i.e., you’ll be looking at baby pictures of increasingly random ex-friends for quite some time). But when it is all said and done, when we’re all connected, what happens?
To answer this question, we might turn to existing technologies that are used for connection and reconnection. We’ve used the telegraph, telephone, email and IM (among many, many others) to create, restart and maintain relationships with people we care about. We’ve all had the email or telephone reconnection with an old friend – after you have the getting-reacquainted conversation, is it really practical to re-integrate the individual into your life? More often than not, it simply isn’t practical (especially if geographic distance is a factor). This doesn’t take away from the wonder of reconnection and the warm feeling it produces – it just means that mediating technologies don’t change everything. Our everyday needs and processes exist higher up in the hierarchy of needs, and reconnection and maintenance of an extended social network is time-consuming.
I say this not to take away from Facebook, but to view the current phenomenon through an historical lens. We should note two key characteristics that differentiate a social network as a reconnector. First, due to video/pictures/applications, an individuals profile can be much more information-rich than previous technologies allow. Whereas you used to have to send pictures in the mail or email, one can browse endless galleries on a social network site. This increase in “social presence” potentially affords a new, deeper connection for people reconnecting (and it certainly makes the process more efficient). Second, newsfeeds have dramatically changed the nature and magnitude of reconnection maintenance. A phone-call or email reconnection is 1 to 1, intentful and requires effort. Watching old friends’ status messages a posted galleries breeze by in a newsfeed is a completely different experience. This raises two questions: 1) Does the lack-of-intent of newsfeed maintenance negatively affect the sense of connection afforded by the technology? 2) Is there a point in time in which we’d rather be finding out information about our present cohort, i.e. do we eventually know “enough” about our reconnected friends? You might be able to tell I’m working on some research in this area!
I mentioned Classmates.com earlier in this post. It strikes me that reconnecting users of Facebook are using the service very much like the Classmates.com model. Of course, the Classmates.com model is broken – it affords minimal meaninful social interaction, the site is frustrating, the service isn’t free, and it is spammy and evil. That said, Classmates.com managed to sign up 40MM accounts (their report), largely based on this incredibly powerful social motive for reconnection. Classmates.com is AOL when it was charging per the minute. Facebook is AOL with a flat fee. And because of that, Facebook will now completely eat Classmates.com’s lunch.
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.
I think the trend in the future that will keep facebook at the top of the interaction hierarchy are social meetings. I used to get evites all the time, now i get them through facebook.
It seems that since a greater percentage of people are on facebook already, it is much easier to manage and encourage their interaction within facebook than without.
I also find that it is much easier to have people invite people. The ability to host and attend events where everyone can post to the message board of that event is nearly priceless.
I think facebook’s growth will stabilize inevitably (only but so many people) but the use is becoming such a part of the social fabric that it may be the actual center of a new era of communication and connectedness. Basically, this is the killer app that online pundits have been prophesying.