Is Facebook It?

Is this It?

And voila, there are 400 million users connected through facebook today. A small concept spearheaded my some Harvard students as a manual of fellow students has grown over its Ivy League student cult days to a global phenomenon. It is THE BIGGEST THING now on the web second only to google in terms to traffic but It is The Master Of Its Own Domain i.e. Social Networking or (maybe not exaggerating the fact) of the primary reason people surf the web. We all know that we cannot compare anything with google.

This secret of this gargantuan success lies on the basic simplicity of the facebook interface. The whole facebook interface can be best visualized as a pre-fabricated form, in many ways similar to a college admission application form, your photo on the top. Nowhere Else. Period. Of course it all comes bundled with a board to express yourself i.e. the facebook wall. Everyone feels comfortable with the great ease of getting everything done by the facebook team. And almost everyone seems to be uncomfortable with new changes.

Facebook has, till now, had great success in balancing the aspects of security, privacy policy along with the formality of its interface and User Control. The latter being the most important. People may hate rules imposed to them but in time find comfort and security in them. Hence facebook has been highly successful by controlled almost autocratic privacy, copyright and security rules. They choose even the god damn resolution of our photos if we don’t use the dojo app and pose a limit!!!

But this control over content has done facebook good. Unlike hi5, which was big some years earlier, but looks like a porn site now, which gave higher control to the user on their profile and allowed HTML coding which of course only about a quarter of population can use good. Myspace has also been compared to facebook but the major difference between them i.e. the use of HTML and CSS coding is the biggest separator of the two giants. The amount of professionalism of facebook is the deciding factor in this turf war. While hi5 and Myspace is divided among nerds using advanced HTML/CSS and simple, common people a war has evolved whereas in facebook, with its support of only plain text and limited perks equality persists along with the legendary simplicity.

But this is the World Wide Web and things do become “that is so last month” along with the unpredictable public opinion. Facebook has been player who has been able to encompass the public feelings well and ride along the waves by reading between the lines and thinking out of the box. What happens to facebook time can only tell but for now. FACEBOOK IS IT!!!