Facebook's growth spurt

Christopher Beam of Slate calls Facebook “the Volvo of social networking,” the kind of “comfy, sturdy, and attractive without being showy” social site “you’d bring home to Mom.” But that’s all changing, at least the Volvo part, since Facebook “tore down its walls and opened its pages” to outside widget providers allowing Facebookers to add to their pages little features like a Graffiti widget that allows visitors to doodle on your page, an “Honest Box” that lets your visitors say what they really think of you (anonymously – watch out, concerned-citizens-against-cyberbullying), or the very popular iLike that lets people share their favorite tunes (“growing at the rate of 200,000 people/day,” as of Beam’s posting, and Graffiti having been downloaded 3.3 million times). He cites the Wall Street Journal as saying Facebook itself added 3 million+ users in the few weeks since its big opening (see “Facebook’s big plans”). In its just-released figures, ComScore says Facebook’s “most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181%), while 12-17 year olds grew 149%” and users 35+ 98%. The smallest growth, understandably was among college-age users (38%), which demographic may already be saturated where Facebook’s concerned.

Facebook's big plans

As Windows came to be the platform for all PCs, Facebook aims to be social networking’s platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. What he meant was, allow other businesses like widget makers and marketers to come in and add to users’ experience fun little functionalities Facebook can’t create all by itself, Fortune magazine reports. Social functionalities, of course. Fortune gave examples: “Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked….” The outcome, the New York Times reports, “is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook’s 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events.” Here, for balance, is Forbes on how widgets work on MySpace, and a widget maker’s POV from Red Herring. Then, for background, here’s a 40-something BBC tech correspondent’s (fun to read) first-hand experience with Facebook and a general social-networking primer from Independent in Dublin. Meanwhile, social networking’s not abating, USATODAY reports, describing three fairly new versions of it.