In his blog post “In defence of Facebook“, Joe Leech from partner company cxpartners makes two very good points about why Facebook is so successful.
His first point is that Facebook gets interactions and people.
Facebook understand users on 2 different and important levels. They understand the interaction between user and computer and they understand the interaction between people and their friends.
The second point was a bit of a revelation to me. I never really got why people would use Facebook to send messages to each other. I always though it just generates an email that arrives in my inbox anyway, which then makes me go onto Facebook to read and reply. Joe enlightened me thus:
With Gmail I get spam, newsletters and mostly crap. I might get 1 email a day from a friend. Because of all this crap I use Facebook, Twitter or SMS to message friends. Email is mostly junk.
If I want to message my friend Jon I should be able do it in a way that suits me and suits Jon. I write the message in Facebook and Jon decides if he gets the message via email, Facebook or SMS. I don’t have to remember which method suits Jon best. I can be sure he’ll get the message.
I would highly recommend a read of the whole article; the points are explained in detail, with some good examples.
8th December 2010 at 11:59 am
This is the thinking that led Facebook to launch their upgraded Messages product last month: http://on.fb.me/db3t4f