Ryan MacMillan

I often have really great prescient ideas for blog pieces. I really do. And they sit in the ether of my mind for about two weeks and coagulate on the bits of paper in the bottom of my bag and in the margins of my notebook as meetings, briefs and what - email? gets in the way and then they’re old hat. But sometimes this has its advantages.

For example, this time it was a really insightful piece about (oh stop yawning) Facebook. I’ve just been away on two weeks holiday (Sicily on my honeymoon if you must know) and when I came home I had been gazumped by a mirror phenomena had occurred in my personal and in my public media. So instead of insights – I’ll provide a bit of a survey.

In my private media (my in-box in this instance) I had received almost a dozen invitations to join Facebook. Geek-centric I thought. Not reflective of anything larger than a Shoreditch shift. Later that week however, in another instance of my personal media, round at my sister’s place; a very non-geek crowd also commented on the flood of invitations to join Facebook.

This then coincided with my public media being awash with Facebook punditry. All the usual suspects; yesterday’s Media Guardian asks a bunch of media types why they are buying into the latest media gimmick. Jeff Jarvis is all over it in his regular Guardian column, Max Kalehoff had a piece in Online Spin
and of course Russell Davies had a piece in Campaign before anyone else.

Jarvis credited the service’s success to a three key things; 1. Its less promiscuous ‘association’ etiquette which means that when people have others as ‘friends’ they are more likely to actually know them, (an aspect of LinkedIn that I really like). ii) The newsfeed of what your friends have been doing on the service and iii) the open API which will allow developers to create application that run on top of the service which will make it an invaluable platform for anyone wanting to enable a community.

Kalehoff likes the integration of Twitter with Facebook and his own blog, the site design and better user experience and being from Nielsen you’d have to expect he’d comment on it; he likes the subtle nature of the advertising.

And finally Russell likes the adult (pared back) nature of the design, the fact that its less anonymous, the open API feature allowing interoperability with lots of other online services and finally - there’s a bunch of other planners on it.

So what did my private media invitees think? I shot out a quick spam on Friday to get their views on why they were now using the service and here’s a sample of the responses;

Colin Donald from FutureScape has been using LinkedIn and MySpace and prefers Facebook for several reasons;

• More generally useful than LinkedIn, which seems to be mainly just for job searching / recruiting
• Better user interface than MySpace
• You can be pretty confident that people are who they claim to be, compared with MySpace
• Good privacy controls
• Helps me see what people I know are doing on a day-to-day basis, which is interesting

Tim Hayward over at Fire And Knives had these reasons;

• I never bothered with Myspace once I knew Lily Alan was on it and ad agencies wouldn’t shut up about it. It seemed like undignified neophytism. I set up a FB page because other people I knew in online communities seemed to be doing so. Unlike Myspace they seemed to be people of my age/background.

• I’ve been on LinkedIn for a year or so and it’s frankly never been of any use to me whatsoever. My network keeps growing (also a noticeable increase in the past fortnight) but I’ve never gained any work or used any contact from it. I guess I don’t ‘expect’ anything from FB, it’s just a bit of fun.

• If you’re looking for an insight I’d say that part of the recent upsurge for me has come from the incredible number of people I know who are suddenly ‘Working From Home’. Quite a few friends have recently left creative industry jobs with nowhere else to go and pretty much all of them assiduously pump the social networks as soon as they have their feet under their home desk.

• I’m writing full time now and work entirely from my laptop. I have a couple of foodie newsgroups alive on my desk all day and they for my ‘office friendships’ - the people I talk top when I stick my head up from the cubicle. I know many of them also work alone and rely on the groups for a network. Spread of FB amongst these people has been like crabs in an all gay submarine, rapid and total.

• Whoever integrates Facebook into their OS/desktop first is going to win all the prizes.

And Mark Iremonger from Proximity; “Facebook manages to feel more human and alive than many of its counterparts through its use of images and data.”

Which of course Jon Bains from Lateral thought was shorthand for “it’s full of university age chick’s and hence is spot on for the lonely 30something male biased London New media industry”. Projecting?

Personally I have quite an emotional investment in my Linkedin profile, dammit - I finally got it up to 100% of my profile complete. But its the feature that only a couple of respondents refer to - the open API that might let me stay on Linkedin but have my Facebook and eat it.