Facebook Emerging as a Complete Social Phenomenon

We have been hearing about the new emerging trends of social media from quite a long time now. Besides other popular web services, Facebook is one of the biggest social networking website so far. Facebook is all about connecting people and providing them the ability to them to share. People can share photos, videos, ideas, links and lots of other things on Facebook. In no time they can meet their friends from workplace, school, college, groups and from anywhere around the world. Facebook is highly popular among high school and college students in particular.

Launched in the year 2004, Facebook is a complete social networking website, founded by Mark Zukerberg, a former Harvard student. With the passage of time, Facebooking has become a complete addiction among youngsters, encouraging them to spend hours on it. Some popular Facebook features include “Status update” that describes the current whereabouts and activity of the user. Another one is “The Wall” which is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. Other than this it also includes a "poke" feature that allows one user to send a "poke" to another one, basically “nudging” them to attract their attention.

The platform of Facebook allows anyone, anywhere to built applications. It has grown so wide now that it brings all other social networks on Facebook. One of the most admired applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos. The applications developers at Facebook have been constantly trying to create viral applications that can become popular by a simple word-of-mouth. Facebook incorporates various social applications such as Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace and some other virally growing applications ranging from “Honesty Box”, “Will you kiss me”, “Rock You” or “Flirtable” to an unlimited number. Facebook also now includes various location and mobile social networking applications in which you can share your location with your friends and let them know what you’re up to or in some other cases the users can vote and win free mobile application and games.

An annoying drawback of Facebook is that it has grown up to vast extent, aiming to become everything to everybody. It has lost its exclusivity by overcrowding people from every race and culture. If we compare it to other social networks, their main objective is to keep themselves restricted to a particular segment such as LinkedIn focusing on business/professional users. One of the biggest disadvantage of Facebook is related to privacy issues where the complete user information (even a lot of intimate information) is published online, making it accessible to strange people and potential stalkers at the click of a button. Facebook can solve these problems by initiating separate closed communities for specific schools and organization using the domain extension of .edu links.

In the end, keeping aside the criticism for a while, we must appreciate the amount of popularity Facebook has attained in a short time. It features all the elements of web 2.0 services which include (sharing, communities, user generated content etc), but keeping its focus on a specific segment and making things less complex for people will help it to become one of the most successful social networking website of future.