I happened to realize the other day that I now have at least four different roles I adopt when I use Facebook. My use of Facebook started out as a professional research thing. I was interested in building a safe social network product (www.connected.info) for the K-12 education market and I wanted to see what all the “commercial” social networks were all about. So, I created an account on MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning, etc. As I began using them, I found out that I could not find anyone to network with on MySpace. I found a few people on Plaxo, but not enough to draw me back. LinkedIn had a lot of people to interact with, but it was about finding a job mostly and I already had one. Ning was too much work. It was only Facebook that I found myself using to interact with my friends. The funny thing was, most of them got accounts to keep tabs on their college age kids. But, I am getting ahead of myself a bit.
The main insight I had the other night was that I have multiple roles I take on when I use Facebook.
- A Freind
- A Professional Contact
- A Parent
- A Gamer
There are perhaps a few more that I use from time to time, but these are the main ones. I find it curious that I am using Facebook for all of these and I wondered why. Is it the tool itself? Is it the content? Is it the network of relationships? It may just be a combination of all of them.
Let me start by looking at what I think the main purpose of Facebook was / is from my point of view. Sometimes, I am interested in interacting with my friends. Reaching out to those I don’t or can’t see on a regular basis is important to me and FB is a nice, although imperfect tool for it. As I said, many of my friends got FB accounts to keep tabs on / stay in touch with their college kids and I was able to find them through the Friend Finder service on Facebook. I was quite content to interact with them from time to time, but I was not an obsessive user.
Then, for no reason I could think of, Facebook started to suggest that I become friends with a long list of seemingly random individuals whom I would term more as professional acquaintance than friends. Initially, I resisted befriending them because I cherished being able to keep friends and work separate. However, as time went on, and I saw the limitations of communicating with people on LinkedIn, I thought it would be good to communicate with those work acquaintances. But, in all honesty, I found that Facebook does not lend itself easily to professional relationships unless they cross the border into friendship. Something about the level of clutter on the newsfeed I think. However, I do see people sending me messages on FB instead of sending emails because they don’t need to remember my email address. This seems to be a trend worth watching.
Then, came the mass MySpace exodus of my children. The ups and downs of using Facebook to communicate with my children are too numerous to retell. But, the efficiency of using FB to stay in touch with the three that live far away is pretty high. One of the kids uses twitter as well and like me, puts things on twitter that she does not on FB so it is interesting to look at that as well. I would like to share two observations about Facebook vs. MySpace with respect to my children. Fisrt, there is something about Facebook that promotes more reasonable behavior than MySpace. My opinion is that there is a much broader collection of individuals using Facebook and thus, the posts and content that are shared by people seem more normal life to me. MySpace seemed to be the service kids used (and still do) to hide all the rebellion and acting out they were up to. It was a convenient way to organize parties you did not want your parents to know about. It is no real surprise that MySpace evolved to include the music industry since so much of music speaks to the young. Second, the user interfaces of the two products lend themselves to different things. MySpace is a place to put “your” home page on. Users speak to others through what is on the page and not necessarily what they share. The Facebook experience, on the other hand, is more about the Newsfeed and what your friends are posting / doing. It borders on the same reason people use twitter, to find out what is up with their friends and not so much who their friends really are.
Finally, and somewhat recently, I have been sucked into the vortex that is Facebook gaming. Mafia Wars, Bloodlines, and Farmville are just a few of the games that leverage the social experience on Facebook. Most have the same general model. They are free for the most part, but offer ways to get ahead of other users if you are willing to part with a small amount of money – a microtransaction. Even games which should just be about a single person experience such as Solitare get a dose of social networking when they migrate to Facebook. The graphics are terrible for the most part and the rules are very simple. So, what is the allure? My opinion is that the gaming experience is yet another way to interact with your list of friends. It is the new version of the old “Family Game Night” idea, except with a potentially much larger group.
The question remains, what is it about the social networking experience with Facebook that promotes all these roles being used?
Continued in Part 2…
