Kent Newsome has a blog post entitled Educating Kent: Facebook where he asks
I have a genuine question. What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress? I would love it if someone could explain this to me.
I have a genuine question.
What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?
I would love it if someone could explain this to me.
As someone who's worked on a blogging/social networking service for the past two and a half years I have some perspective on why social networking sites are more popular than blogs (i.e. more people have a social network profile than a traditional "blog").
MY ANSWER: Social networking sites [especially Facebook] take better advantage of the human need to communicate by leveraging the following trends that became obvious once blogging took off
Personal publishing is more than just text, it spans all media. Videos, music and photos are just as important for people to share as is text. Traditional blogging tools/services like WordPress and Blogger have not taken advantage of this fact.
People like to be informed about what is going on in their circle of friends (i.e. social networks). Bloggers tend to do this by subscribing to RSS feeds in their favorite RSS reader. Unfortunately, subscribing to RSS feeds has and always will be a fairly cumbersome means to satisfy this need regardless of how many browsers, email clients and Web sites add RSS reading functionality. On the other hand, a model where subscription is automatic once a user declares another user as being of interest to them (e.g. adding them as a friend) as opposed to locating and subscribing to their RSS feed is easier for users to adopt and use. In addition, integrating the process of keeping abreast of updates from "friends" into an existing application the user is familiar with and uses regularly is preferable to introducing a new application. I like to call this the LiveJournal lesson.
The above phenomena are the reason that MSN Spaces Windows Live Spaces grew to having over 100 million unique visitors less than two years after it first showed up. MSN Spaces was one of the first major personal publishing sites to place publishing of other media (e.g. photo albums) on the same footing as blogging/creating a journal. This was a big hit with users and the service followed up with tools for embedding music and videos, however we didn't provide media hosting or a library of content which users could choose from. These mistakes weren't made by MySpace which thanks to its widget platform could rely on services like PhotoBucket and YouTube to provide both media hosting and a library of content for users to share. Now MySpace is one of the most popular sites on the Web.
The second major reason for the initial success of MSN Spaces Windows Live Spaces lies in its integration with Windows Live Messenger . The key aspect of this integration was the gleams feature which was described as follows by Paul Thurrott in his review of MSN Messenger 7
Additionally, when you click on your own display picture in Messenger 7.0, your Contact Card displays (Figure). This small window provides a range of personal information and links to other MSN services. You can access other users' Contact Cards by clicking their picture in the main Messenger window (Figure). But Messenger 7.0 takes this capability a bit further with another new feature called a gleam, that visually reminds you when one of your contacts has updated their MSN Spaces blog or other personal information. Gleams appear as small orange stars next to contact pictures in the main MSN Messenger window (Figure).
With gleams, the act of adding someone as an IM buddy also subscribes you to getting updates about changes on their Windows Live space. Our users loved it. In hindsight, where we dropped the ball is that it isn't much of a stretch to imagine a Web interface which summarizes these updates from your friends so you can access it from anywhere not just your IM client. In addition, it is also lame that we don't provide details of the nature of the update inline and instead require users to click on the contact card to tell which of their friends information has changed. Once you add those two features, you've pretty much got Twitter (text only) and the Facebook News Feed which have both turned out to be big hits on the Web.
To recap, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are better bigger than blogging sites because they enable people to connect, communicate and share with each other in richer and easier ways than blogging does.