I was on Pownce for the first time this week to see if it was still kicking and there was Robert Scoble, not even 10 posts down. Now I think Robert’s great, but there must be 3 or 4 of him, because he’s everywhere. So his post asked the cool kids at Pownce, ‘who is not on Facebook?’, and surprisingly, a bunch were not. Some still are using email and don’t see why they need Facebook.
All the talk this week has been Facebook, the next Microsoft and Facebook, the new email. I see the usefulness of Facebook, but only between friends. Unless you go the route of Scoble and invite everybody to be your friend, it is useless for anything except keeping in contact with your friends. Now if you go one step further out and go from ‘friends’ to ‘contacts’, then your reach just got a little broader, but it is still limited. Why? I just had a meeting today with a consultant. I will be doing business with her for the next four months or so. So, do I ask her to be my friend on Facebook so I can contact her when I need to? I don’t think so. I will email her. I will email my friends and they will email me.
I don’t get it. I must be getting old. I do think it’s a nice app and I think some of the applications are neat. I haven’t found any of my friends on Facebook except for a long lost elementary school friend. And it’s not like my friends aren’t tech savvy. I got my wife to join so I could have someone on there I did know well and test out some of the features and find out what poking somebody did.
Now, if they open it up and have a decent online email application and suddenly I can receive emails at a @facebook.com address, it may be a Gmail killer, but then it’s opened up to the outside world and spam and advertisements will ruin the new car smell.
I think all this talk of the next big thing and the next Microsoft is a little premature. They are a few steps away from having all your info and being the big bad evil Facebook that won’t let you ____(fill in the blank).
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