Jeff Clavier of Software Only has written an excellent post on Facebook's Q&A session last night at Stanford's ETL program. Beyond the sheer jaw-dropping statistical aspects of Facebook's tremendous growth (summarized below), I would net out a good chunk of their magic as making the process of what I call "traversing contexts" friction-free.
By traversing contexts, what I mean is that I can build a profile of myself -- where I go to school, my former high school, what classes I am taking, what books I like, etc., and within a single click, I have visibility to a bunch of people that have common interests.
Think about the simplicity and power of that model (relative to search) for social activities. Or better yet, let me give you a simple use case.
Let's say that I am taking Abnormal Psychology at my university. Traversing from my profile, I am one click away from knowing everyone that is taking the same class. Maybe I am looking for a study partner. Maybe I just want to see if that girl that I have been looking at knows anyone that I know who can make an introduction.
So I click around some more because one of the profiles that has come up looks "interesting." Now this click reveals that this woman is "married" to someone of the same sex. Hmm. Did not see that coming. (Sidenote: married is Facebook lingo in the same way that the word "poking" someone is lingo in the Facebook realm -- intentionally ambiguous.)
But it also reveals that this person is a member of the "Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good...And Want to Learn to Do Stuff Good Too" Group, which clearly has to be a joke.
Another click reveals that this is a pseudo group created by lovers of the movie Zoolander, and the profile page of the group has a picture of Ben Stiller, the group has officers, discussion threads, related groups and...1938 members. Let me repeat that: 1938 members! Did that many people even SEE Zoolander?
So what have I learned? In three clicks, I went from the context of my classmates to the context of random but novel student to the context of affilitation with a mindset (by membership in an irreverent group whose purpose is to accessorize my persona). And I have spent 15-20 minutes traversing these contexts and having a good time in the process.
Before you dismiss this all as just a silly fad, consider the following. One, the workflow of moving up, down or sideways into different realms of meaning (contexts) is totally friction free in this model.
Two, it encourages the short attention span generational mindset. I have 15 minutes, maybe I will see what is new or interesting out there, and post a comment or two.
Three, it is synchronous with the stumble upon aspect that makes life such an adventure. I can start anywhere and have no idea where I will end up. And four, it is fun. Facebook does not take itself too seriously, all the while providing real utility to its user base.
What is that utility? Well, it's providing a space for meaningful conversations via a mechanism for "lookup and hookup" according to whatever context jumps your boat. Increasingly that activity is for coalescing around specific events -- dorm parties, local activities, private get togethers, and now photo sharing.
No question that the context of a known demographic and filtration around meaningful boundaries like "UC Berkeley" are very powerful, and part of the Facebook's unfair advantage. But another takeaway is that Facebook proves that you don't need to glut a service with features for features sake or have heavily stylized interfaces to look professional.
No, the power here is speed, simplicity and friction free traversing of contexts, facilitating conservations of all types.
The raw numbers:
- 5M+ registered users
- Coverage of 45% of US colleges (a total of 2,000 - representing 8M students)
- 80% penetration among students of colleges that are on the platform
- 10th most visited Internet site in the US
- 5.5B page/views a month (230M page/views a day)
- 8.5M unique visitors
- Signing 20,000 new users a day
- Repeat usage: daily 70%, weekly 85%, monthly 93% – can you think of another site that sees 93% of its registered users coming back every month ?
There is much goodness in Facebook to emulate.
