TIME Magazine on Facebook and social networks

Why Facebook Is the Future - TIME By LEV GROSSMAN

• Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering.
• Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.
• It's a website, but in a sense, it's another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that's everything the larger Net is not.
• People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact.
• Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older
• Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network.
• Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.

My Take

Facebook would likely be interested in an avenue for expanding its penetration into the 30-50 something market - particularly if that avenue came part and parcel with a unique and viral entre into the $65+ billion local advertising market - with positive cash flow from the get go.

Any such application developer would do well to consider integration with Facebook as a key business requirement.

Saturday September 8, 2007 - 03:42pm (EDT)