FB: The Trendy Next Best Bookend?

First let me start with the following video, which is one of my favorite Facebook videos:
I’ve been a member of Facebook since August or September of 2004. I will never forget the day the girl with whom I was interning at my first film-related internship introduced me to Facebook. She went to Princeton and, at the time, Facebook was only for students at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Duke, & maybe even a few other Ivy Leagues. By the end of the summer, my alma mater Johns Hopkins was officially on. I don’t even remember the girl’s name or the names of the people for whom I was interning. Facebook, on the other hand, hasn’t left my thought process since. Even though I have officially deactivated my account 3 times (and clearly I'm not the only one), it was never out of hatred so much as it was out of confusion about where my relationship with FB was going. So, where is it going? Not sure. But, let’s see where we think Facebook itself might be going in the next couple of years…

Personally, I think Facebook will be around but boring. I may be biased since I have been using Facebook for nearly 6 years. It seems to me, however, that you get to a point where being big goes against the appeal of being in a social circle. This applies mainly to real life. People, by nature, associate to clans and groups. The bigger the group, the more invisible you become. Exclusivity, on the other hand, makes organizations desirable. Clearly I’m not talking about politics. But, lets think about private clubs like Boujis (night club in London), Soho House (hotel, restaurant and meeting place in London, New York and LA), The Harvard Club (university club), Puerta de Hierro (golf and weekend club in Madrid) or A Small World (online social network). The similarity amongst them is their exclusivity and the difficulty to become a member of each; you either have to be invited, recommended or you have to pay your way in. And this doesn’t only apply to the social world. Think about the Council on Foreign Relations or even joining the board of a company or a school. Just because most of these examples are not online does not mean that the principle changes: people like to be connected to the people to whom they want to be connected. As soon as the pool becomes diluted, they look for fresh land where they can dig a hole and fill their new pond. So, when it comes to Facebook it’s fun to joke around about having your entire family on their and being able to be connected to over 1000 people but its rare to find a joke that is eternally funny (barring the aristocrats joke, I guess). Clearly this first intuition on the future of Facebook is based on observation and I have no psychological research to back it up. But, I can tell you one thing: the success of these sites are often centered around how well they click with tweens and the 20 year olds of the world. As I understand it, the new cool thing in the States is My Yearbook. While one site may not effect the giant that is Facebook, the quick rise in popularity definitely implies that people are slowly getting distracted by other options which may effect the role of Facebook in the future.

That said, the extreme openness of the network has proven to be beneficial to mass communication strategies that will likely be cloned in the near future. Just looking at the 2008 Presidential election in the USA serves as proof enough of the power of Facebook to convey information on a grandiose level. As the CNN article specifies, the election was won not only because of face time but also because of the candidates ability to seem engaged with the population and one way in which they did this was through Facebook. This wasn’t the first time Facebook, or any other social network, was used for political or social campaigning. So, while Facebook may not allow individuals to be relevant socially because of the lack of exclusivity, it does become a powerful tool when it comes to power in numbers. If anything, the feeling of connectedness and social acceptance is a very powerful tool which, when implemented correctly, can give one great power and attract support. It’s 2010, so we have another election in the states coming up in 2 years. Perfect timing! I think they will use Facebook again (and any other online social network source) and I think it will be still be effective but it will also be a perfect marker to use when comparing the future with the present.

A lot of people have talked about privacy and Facebook. I’m not going to talk about it because it seems silly to reiterate what everyone has said (not to mention that I’ve discussed security in my other entries) but this does seem like an interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg at D8 which I thought everyone might enjoy!

Finally, I want to talk about Facebook: The Movie. It’s actually called The Social Network and will star Justin Timberlake, Rachida Jones, and Jesse Eisenberg. This is a $50 million movie with Scott Rudin, Trigger Street and Michael De Luca Productions producing. So, this is no joke. And Columbia is distributing and already has deals in Finland, France and Argentina. It is set to be released in October of this year. This seems pretty important to discuss. Not because it will reveal something about the life of Facebook to come so much as the weight that one site has managed to gain in the world as well as the legacy it will inevitably leave behind (assuming, at some point, Facebook is not Facebook as we know it). So, will Facebook be around in 2 years? Well, definitely on DVD, or on OnDemand or GoogleTV or something. And it will probably even still be online…but there’s no guarantee that I’ll still be on it….