I've mentioned in the past how I felt
Facebook is truly the social network positioned the best. Let's go ahead and make that a "was."
I wasn't going to hop on the hate bandwagon. In fact, I actually thought their new stalker features were fairly clever, if nothing else, original. Seeing how poorly their user community reacted to the change makes me wonder if they really bothered to run it by anyone though. Say it with me guys,
Usability Tests. Not only would their users give them interesting feedback on their thoughts regarding features, they'd probably help them further improve things like the navigation (which I personally think could be better.. just my opinion, of course...).
Anyway, now they're allowing any creepy internet predator guy to create an account and "poke" sorority girls at colleges.? The charm behind Facebook is the exclusivity. The technology, as many have noted, isn't anything special and quite easily re-creatable. How is this going to pane out? I'm not sure, but I'm no longer going to emphatically preach that their going to win the war.
Unless they know something that we don't. I mean, when Netscape made the switch, we knew damn well we were going to piss off anywhere from 20-40% of the user base. It wasn't a profitable enough user base though. So... Here we are.
Somehow I doubt thats the case, and they're really just trying to scale this thing to extremely large numbers. It's
not wasn't about the numbers though, it was about the penetration rate amongst college students. And that demographic should be a valuable one, more importantly, college alumni should be a valuable one. Wait 10-15 years when these kids are using Facebook to keep up with old college classmates and find future business partners, and you've got an indispensable tool that can write its own ticket. Killing that off to raise your user count, really just makes you another social network.
Anyway.. I hope they know more than everyone seems to think, and they do now seem to be reaching out to their community. Facebook was the first (and other than
LinkedIn, the only) social network to actually impress me. We'll just have to wait and see what moves they make I guess.
So I'm all packed in. I'll be using Gavin's futon for a bit while I search out apartments. Primarily looking in College Park, Thorton Park, Winter Park, or Downtown (the parks + downtown). So far, it still hasn't really phased me that I moved -- probably because I've been on the go for the last 6 months or so anyway I guess. Thanks for all the people who have offered to help. I still have some phone calls to return, but I'll get there in time.