Old Friends on Facebook

By Justin Fox

I knew something significant was up when, a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that a long-ago boss had added me as a "friend" on Facebook. This was a genuine grownup with an important and time-consuming job (that is, not a magazine writer). And here he was, asking me to be his social-networking buddy.

A lot of the things that grownups already do on the Internet, from blogging to participating in PTA newsgroups to mass e-mailing bad jokes to friends and family, could be described as social networking. The term is applied mainly, though, to the services that enable users to collect and communicate with a network of "friends." Friendster was the first, in 2002. The rise of these outfits has been one of the great business and societal stories of recent years. Americans now spend more time on MySpace, which was founded in 2004 and has supplanted Friendster, than on any other domain, including Google.

Up to now, though, this has been a game for the kids. Yes, lots of politicians and musicians and other adults have MySpace pages. But MySpace sees its core market as people in their 20s. Hardly anybody of my acquaintance (I'm 43 and don't know a lot of politicians or musicians) hangs out there. I do know lots of people on LinkedIn, a business-networking site. But LinkedIn is about finding jobs and making deals and getting answers to business questions. It's not a place to while away your days.

Which brings us to Facebook. Founded at Harvard early in 2004 by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and transplanted to California that summer, it swept the nation's campuses with its unique mix of exclusivity (you couldn't sign up without a college e-mail address) and postadolescent rambunctiousness. Facebook began admitting high schoolers in 2005, started hooking up workplace networks (first at companies that employ lots of recent grads) in April 2006 and opened to all in September.

Now Facebook claims to be signing up 150,000 new members a day. MySpace says it's adding 250,000 members daily, but those don't all represent actual people (MySpace places no restrictions on how many identities one can assume), and there's a widespread belief--albeit one not yet backed up by much hard data--that Facebook is gaining ground. It's a belief shared by Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns MySpace. When an interviewer quipped in June that readers were abandoning newspapers for MySpace, Murdoch shot back, "I wish they were. They're all going to Facebook at the moment."

In May, Facebook opened its online platform to anyone who wants to build applications for it, from music-sharing services to carpool arrangers, making it a potentially much more useful tool. Some in Silicon Valley wonder excitedly if the company--which reportedly turned down a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo! last year--might become not just the hottest tech IPO since Google but also the next major stage in the Web's evolution. First there was the browser, then the search engine. Now we'll move on to what Zuckerberg calls the "social graph," the filter of personal connections that defines Facebook.

"Over the next three or four or five years, this stuff is going to reach a much larger number of people," says Marc Andreessen, whose Netscape browser helped launch the first age of the Internet as a mainstream phenomenon. "It's just getting started." Andreessen describes Facebook as akin to AOL in the 1990s--introducing tens of millions of beginners to a new form of communication. As a co-founder of Ning, a maker of customized social networks, he's betting that many users will eventually tire of the one-size-fits-most approach. But he hastens to add that Facebook "is going to be supersuccessful."

So, what are the newly arrived grownups doing now on Facebook? My previously dormant account suddenly began filling up in May with "friends"--journalists, Silicon Valley networkaholics, a guy in Australia who sometimes comments on my blog, plus a few important people like my ex-boss. Facebook's News Feed updates me on whom these people have befriended, where they're vacationing, whether they went on a bike ride today, and the like. It's frivolous stuff, but you can see the potential of an online world arranged to emphasize the doings and opinions of those who matter to you most. You can see the pitfalls too, mainly in defining who matters. In the world of Facebook, friends don't drift apart. Either someone makes an active break, or the connection and the News Feeds go on forever. Get used to it.