It seems as though many of us on this blog has beaten the idea that “Facebook” is a network phenomena to death. However it is the absolute truth. Facebook has grown from a small community of Harvard students to a social site that is starting to rival MySpace. Now on its evolutionary path I believe there were two distinct stages in its young lifespan. The first when it grew from one college to colleges nation/worldwide. The other stage is after Facebook as a company came out onto the stage in the media and of course in the world of business. At this stage Facebook users expanded to include other social networks including those of different cities, countries, countinents. I’m sure you can all relate, our relatives started friending us.

This first stage is relatively uninteresting. You can consider the users as relatively homogeneous as at that time all the users were involved in some college or university (mostly students, probably some “in the know” staff). Therefore the growth of the network would follow normal protocol.

The second stage is perhaps more interesting. It involves an entire new set of users. As you can probably sympathize with me, we tend to think that our relatives are comparatively different from ourselves. You can almost see where I am going with this. I believe that these new set of users were the clusters that stopped the diffusion of Facebook. However, in this case it acted more like a boundary. So what did Zuckerberg and the Facebook team do to extend their social networking site’s reach? 2 things come in to mind:

1. They created a new category of networks based on cities - What this did is that it reestablished the social boundaries of the users. At first as a user I would only indentify others on the basis of what college I went to. However with the network based on cities, they removed the limiting factor that a user had to be a college affiliated.

2.  The use of applications -Both apple and facebook capatalized on user created content. Applications provided incentives to join the site for those seeking to make a quick buck with their programming ideas. However more importantly, the content itself provided increased value in using the site. For instance, the MyPets application on facebook has attracted many of my younger female cousins to facebook (and yes I do get friend invitations from them) and oddly enough some of my aunts (I guess you’re never too young).

I believe it was the 2nd addition to the website that really solidified Facebook’s growth. The most important factor I believe is that it lowered the threshold of the barrier into other networks by adding value to the site itself. Of course this move had its drawbacks as I know several of people who have abandoned facebook all together as they claim it has become too annoying and cluttered. From what I recall, these were the same criticisms for MySpace. Clearl facebook, with the ever increasing number of users is now suffering from negative externalities (although for a social networking site, the good from an increased number of users far outweighs the bad from a business standpoint).

Another important concept tha the facebook team has put in place is the blatant keyword-based advertising (covered a while back in chapter 14) put on the site. Although, I cannot fault them for doing such as it was the logical business decision for them. At the end of the day though, you can see that Mark Zuckerberg and co. must have been students in Networks because it seems every major change (and by major, I’m not including the Facebook design changes debate) they make with the site has met with relatively high levels of success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

This link provides the history of how facebook came to where it is now

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=31033537130

I just found this interesting as it is from Mark Zuckerberg himself on the evolution of facebook.