Facebook is, apparently, a social network. Let us point out that a social network is not a directory of persons, but a directory of links. The underlying principle is the Six Degrees Of Separation theory, which says that between any two people on earth, there are no more than five intermediaries. Take a bushman, for example:  you know someone who knows someone who, etc. who knows the bushman. All online social network are the same, in that they are not that much interested in people, but rather in relations. The proof is simple: if someone quits Facebook definitively (which is not that easy), what disappears is more than one entry in the directory, it is all links and all interactions with one’s 130 friends (the average number in mid 2010).

We shall not dwell on the amazing Facebook statistics; 500 million members, whose half connect every day, thus contradicting a sentence I hear quite often: “I am fed up with Facebook, and I quit” (sentence putting Facebook equal to the television). Actually, the celebrity on Facebook who lasted the shortest time was a charming English Lady, Ivy Bean, who joined Facebook in 2008 at the age of 102, and died in July 2010 with 5,000 friends, and also 56,000 followers on twitter.

Facebook is fundamentally different from other social networks, by at least one aspect: its open APIs. Most social networks, including professional ones, have very poor semantics in respect to the links. Linkedin, for example, allows two main definitions for the link : “we know each other“, with a few parameters (we are colleagues/one is the boss of the other/we have contracted work between one another , etc.), and “we are part of a same group“.

In Facebook, the semantic of the link is open through a set of programming interfaces, thus enriching the relation between two or more persons. Users can then calibrate their interaction, for instance they may poke each other, send flowers, play together, invite one another to an aperitif, or even share a kitty to buy a common gift. This opening of the APIs is what attracts brands, with the hope to make low cost viral marketing.

Facebook was, from the outset, designed to be an applications platform, something much more sophisticated than a simple social network. And so, little by little, Facebook overflowed out of it’s platform, and, as a cuckoo, positioned itself on sites beyond its own, each time bringing with it, a very interesting function, albeit a little intrusive.

The first one was Facebook Connect . The principle here, is quite straight forward: when someone develops a web site which requires authentication, why bother developing this feature, when Facebook offers it for free, and at low integration cost. The interesting side effect is that the end user is no longer obliged to enter one more time their own identification. It is a real win-win-win deal : the user avoids burden, the web site owner avoids development, and Facebook gains not only more users, but also more knowledge about usage. One should remark that, on Facebook, one has usually a single identity, which is contrary to the basic usage of the Internet: why should one be the same in a professional bulletin board, a forum of enthusiasts, on dating site, or as an avatar in Second Life? Facebook is always chasing for people taking another identity than his own; Facebook is anything but anonymous.

Then came the like button, which was also free to put on any other web site. If someone browses a site, and likes it, they can very easily share it, by making a single click and have it then appear on their Facebook wall. It is the same win-win logic, the web site developer sees his own viral promotion done for free. The same logic applies for other plugins : recommendations, videos, and so on. They are all offered by Facebook, under the obvious term “Social Plugin“, with the intention to be the viral marketing enablers; not only on Facebook site, but on any other site. This is a big shift from other social networks, and is in the same spirit as the Amazon set of widgets which were invented 5 years ago.

The very last one, still under test, is the button subscribe to, which allows users to follow someone else’s messages; a service directly competing with Twitter.

Facebook is forging its expansion in creative ways. In what is perhaps the strongest signal yet, it made a significant shift in its relationship to virtual goods. Those little virtual objects, which are to be found on social platforms, and hugely in 3D immersive platforms, represented, only in the US, a 3 billion US dollars market in 2009. Facebook started selling them in 2008, but the revenue was low, a few ten million dollars, almost nothing. Facebook therefore decided, earlier this year, to totally change its strategy, stop selling virtual goods, offering instead, a virtual currency, Facebook Credits, which allows 3^rd party virtual goods to be brought and sold inside the platform. If the same logic applies, this virtual money could, one day, be used on other platforms. Will Facebook become the apps store of virtual goods? Will Facebook also be interested in the market of real goods, trying to do better than Google Checkout, an attempt to be a front-end, unique payment system, which never really took off?

Then, very recently, came Facebook Places…

The market of local information is the biggest battlefield of the Internet nowadays. Being straightforward: I can quite easily, owing to twitter or blogs, know what happens in the street of Tehran. But it is 5 to 8pm on Sunday in Paris, there are three boulangeries which close at 8, I have not enough time to visit all of them, and I don’t know which one has remaining bread…

Many actors are in this market of local information. Google with Google maps, Yellow Pages, Craig’s list, Tripadvisor, Aroundme, and the last one, Foursquare. Facebook is now clearly entering this arena, and wishes to position itself on geo-localized data . Mobile Facebook apps already offer this function, albeit in the US only, at the time of this writing.

The difference between Facebook and Google is striking. We must not forget that the power of the Web is in peer to peer relations. Google, counter-intuitively perhaps, has never been 2.0. Google groups, is a revamping of the Usenet hierarchy, through the acquisition of dejanews. It is the only Google service where users are interconnected. On the other hand, Facebook Places, like Foursquare or Aroundme, allows users to exchange information on a wall. Google Maps does not.

If Google is still heavily controlling search, and advertisements on the Internet, Facebook is positioning itself more and more in crucial places: authentication, virtual goods and why not one day real goods payment, exchange of information, local information; and all this not only on its own platform, but everywhere, through its plugins. For Google, the search engine is free, and makes its income by leveraging other products, such as AdSense or AdWords. Facebook is now doing what Google has done so well, giving away its core service, to allow side businesses to come in. The difference is that it is doing it where Google is not that present: peer to peer.

Facebook is clearly taking control of some crucial applicative layers of the internet, specially the viral ones, with a probable desire to be, one day, the operating system of the Internet.

Facebook is amongst the weirdest social site in the whole world wide web.

Facebook is not as crazy as datemypet, which pretends to be a social network for animals, not as specialised as sermo, a social network of doctors, not as business as Mechanical turk, a platform to put together small knowledge workers, not as idealistic as kiva, a marketplace to invest against poverty, not as old-simple-and-basic as craigslist, the most efficient local ad platform, not as nice as Habbo hotel, the biggest virtual world so far, (over 150 Million teenagers, probably more than Facebook within the 10-15 years old), not as focused as myfootballclub, a social network aimed at buying football clubs, not as professional as Innocentive, a platform to improve innovation for corporates, etc…

So Facebook is not all of that. Facebook is just Facebook. What is weird about Facebook is that it is complex to use (funny to realize how complicated its interface is…); its privacy is a nightmare, as says this excellent article from the NYT, with a funny proof here; Facebook even contains its own rebellion, which seems to be a long tradition (yes, 2006…); it generates desire to quit (on the 31st of may…); has huge bugs; and seems to be in a rather negative phase those days, according to top google search : “how to delete my facebook account”.

And, as of may 2010, facebook has 400 million users; the third largest country in the world, with a huge velocity of 25 million new users per month end of 2009. In October 2009, hosting Facebook was performed using 30.000 servers.

So, why is there such a hate / love story ?

Facebook is a social network. Many people think a social network as a directory of people. It is not; it is a directory of links. What is most important is not who is someone, but whom is he connected to. When I quit Facebook (I did it four times), it is not my single entry which disappears, it is also all the links I had with my friends, and all the dynamic of what happened between my friends and I (well, it almost disappear). A social network is based on the six degrees of separation theory, which says that two random people on earth can be connected only with 5 intermediate people on the chain. A social network is about connection, while the Internet at first was putting the intelligence at the end of the connection. With this respect, Facebook is not in the pure Internet philosophy. Napster is.

On most social network the focus is on the link, but the semantic on the link is very limited. In Linkedin, as an example, the number of parameters on the link for the introduction is 6 (colleague, classmate, done business together, friend, other, and unknown person…). Then, people can share sub-groups. But there are no other semantic on the link.

The path chosen by Facebook was totally different: Facebook creates the network, and by opening its API, allows anyone to virtually plug any semantic on the links. We can share a same brand, a common taste, poke each other, send virtual gifts, etc… The idea in itself is brilliant, and led to 550.000 active applications.

Now, on the downsize: first, privacy. It is not that much about my information privacy, but my interaction privacy. Whenever someone interacts on my wall, it is never clear who as seen what happened to me. A friend of mine may post a porn video on my wall, it is OK as long as only my friend and I know about it. But who else has seen this, I don’t know. In some languages, plural starts at three. Old Greek, or modern Arabic, have a singular, a dual, and a plural. This is a very clever approach of life : plural starts only when a third party witnesses the interaction between two others. By being unclear on this, Facebook can make many people nervous. A totally open society, where everybody sees and knows 100% about everybody, is inhuman.

Second, identity in context. One of the beauty of the Internet is that it allows people to have multiple identities. Why would someone be the same on a forum devoted to digital photo, on a forum about Italian operas, on a professional forum, on linkedin, on match.com, in Second Life, etc… Even though the person is the same, the context is not. On Facebook, a person is one, single, and not divisible. But on Facebook, the context can be pretty much various, because of the API opening. This lead to a contradiction. As an example, one of the biggest issues is to decide if parents and children should be friends of Facebook. In real life, interacting with your children is a done within a very strong, specific, and focussed context. Finding this context openly interleaved with other contexts can make many people nervous. Moreover, Facebook connect is propagating this constraint outside of the platform. The “Like” button, which is part of their social media plugins, and now social graph, is their most recent attempt to be “the web”

So why are people using Facebook ? The biggest population is 18-24 years old, and the biggest rate of change is in the senior population (cf. slide 8 of o’Reilly radar slideshare). Facebook is not for teen agers. When asking people about why they use Facebook, the most common answer is “retrieving old friends”.

So the conclusion is very simple from my point of view: Facebook could be used to propagate information, to retrieve old friend, but no more. Don’t use Facebook for application, rather use Facebook to propagate the information about application. Don’t use Facebook Connect, use OpenId (by the way, Facebook is a sponsoring member of OpenId).

Brands should pay more attention to discussion forums, places where the quantity of important information, which are not always exploited, is much bigger than anywhere else. Much bigger than in Facebook.

I have quitted Facebook.

Facebook is a fascinating and intriguing phenomenon. Hate and love. On one side, a planetary phenomenon, with splendid growth; and on the other a lot of concern about privacy, and other related questions. If one had to understand the scope of facebook, a look at its wikipedia entry, or, more precisely, at the left colum : how many different wikipedia, in the sense different languages, have an entry about facebook, is impressive : 59 different languages…

There are too many studies about facebook, it is not the point here to recall them. This post started from a very specific remark, coming from a 19 years old person : “one of my professor asked me to be a friend on facebook. I did not feel comfortable, so I declined“.

Very interesting remark, from many perspective. First of all, there are people who can resist the pressure, and those people are 19 years old. Second remark, yes, facebook is about communities. But what is a community ? “I can laugh about any topics, but I cannot laugh with everybody“. When asking why he declined, this person confessed that : “I do not want my professor to see my friends in bathing suits“. There is no problem with being in bathing suit, except one : who is looking at me. It is all about context.

So, what does it mean to be part of a community ? Let me recall about a person who is almost forbidden, Wilfred Thesiger. Interestingly, its french entry on wikipedia is more complete than it english entry. Probably because he was very critic about British Petroleum’s impact on one of his love, the  Rub’Al Khali, the main desert of Saudi Arabia. He was a multi cultural person, born in Addis Abbeba from a father who was the British ambassador, graduated from Oxford, and decided to share simple life with Arabian tribes. He spent four years in the Rub’ al Khali with the nomads. He wrote a superb book out of this experience : Arabian Sands.

In his third crossing of the desert, he had a very interesting conversation with the nomads. Suddenly, one of them asked him, in a very provokative way :”Why do you not convert to Islam?“. Wilfred Thesiger had a superb answer, a single sentence from Quran : “Let God protect me from the Devil“. Superb with two respects: firstly, he told them “I share with you, I have the same life as you, but do not forget that I am different from you”, thus confirming his identity. Secondly, on the syntactic level, by using a sentence from the Quran, he spoke their language. The answer from the nomadic was beautiful : they laughed. It is all about “yes, I am part of a community, but I keep my identity, my personal willing; and therfore, I choose what I do share, and what I do not”. Exactly what this 19 years old person did, by not answering the request to be friend with the professor.

Facebook is a very innovative service, far in advance from many other social networks. But the main issue is the relationship between usage, and technology. This story about confusion in relationships in Facebook is not isolated; many people have experienced it. What we may learn is that it is much more dificult to master facebook than any other social network. Facebook is a very long term tool; a concept not very compatible with the usual short term investment views of United States. This means a very passionate debate to come, a debate about the importance of ethic versus moral.