Time Magazine interviewed the 23 year-old Founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. When asked about the future of his endlessly growing brand, Zuckerberg described the differences between the standard social-networks like Myspace and Friendster versus Facebook – which he calls a “social-utility”.
Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.
And his thoughts on the “utility component” have become very accessible since their release of Facebook Platform – a Facebook content developing tool free, and for the non-Facebook-employed Developer.
Big-ups to l-e-mental.com!
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
While Facebook is getting pretty useful with all these applications, it shouldn’t forget it’s roots or try to be something it’s not. Let’s face it–most people still use it as a network/way to connect with friends–not because it has all these utility components. It will be interesting to see if this will change over time. While you can do a bunch of cool things with Facebook apps (shop online, sell stuff, track stocks, etc) the real versions of those things (Ebay, craigslist, Forbes, etc) are still much more attractive to use, in my opinion.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:56 am