Excellent article from ReadWriteWeb about productive Facebook usage:
Oh the heels of some of Facebook’s missteps (ahem, Beacon) and the proliferation of a myriad of useless, silly, and time-wasting apps, some former Facebook users decided to quit the site for good this year. However, a handful of early adopter angst doesn’t have Facebook worried. Why is that? Because Facebook has a whole generation of users who grew up using their site for everything social back when it was just a way to network with their high school or college friends. So what are the everyday Facebook users doing that keeps them engaged in the service? It’s not throwing sheep, apparently. For many Facebook users, there are still useful apps to be found and ways to use the service that the rest of us could learn from.
On Sunday, Fred Wilson wrote on his blog “A VC”:
“The other day I saw my oldest daughter get an invite to a party on Facebook, she accepted it, and then went to look at her accepted invite page. It was her social calendar, every party she plans to attend in the next two months is there. She noticed she had another event that night and then switched her acceptance to tentative. She uses Facebook the way I use Outlook.”
Although the comment was in the context of a data portability discussion, there was something about this particular excerpt that was striking. Facebook as Outlook. You’ve heard older corporate execs describing how they “live in Outlook.” Well, it’s the same with the young digital natives – they just live in Facebook instead. And whether it’s a walled garden or not, it doesn’t matter to them – all the data they care about is flowing into Facebook. Who cares if it flows back out?
