Sharing your life on Facebook
What has something really cool that you've never seen before and can't get anywhere else? The answer is Facebook, which now says it is adding a staggering five million members a week.
President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends, like you, in high places. Facebook at five-years-old is at 175 million subscribers and growing at five million new members a week, makes it a rare bright spot in a dismal global economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's. To reach 175 million subscribers in the past, took the telephone 89 years, television 38 years, and the cellphone 14 years.
The newest members---the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate---are mature types who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to overshare on the Web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive and a lot more fun.
An addictive quality keeps Facebook's typical user on the site for an average of 169 minutes a month, according to ComScore. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for a mere ten minutes a month. The "stickiness" of the site is a key part of Facebook's plan to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life. Offline we bump into friends and end up talking for hours. We flip through old photos with our family. We join clubs. Facebook lets us do all that in digital form. Basic privacy controls today allow users to share varying degrees of information with friends; as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional and indispensable.
Facebook could be a "social utility" that one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the Web--a truly global digital phone book. It may become the equivalent of the phone itself: It is the main tool people use to communicate for work and pleasure. It also becomes the central place where members organize parties, store pictures, find jobs, watch videos, and play games. Eventually, they'll use their Facebook ID as an online passkey to gain access to websites and online forums that require personal identification. In other words, Facebook may be where people live their digital lives.
Facebook's march to 200 million users began in earnest in January 2008. That's when the site made translation tools available to international users. Today, more than 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S., and most of them read it in their native language. But anecdotal evidence suggests that American Baby Boomers have discovered Facebook in a big way. Others are using it as a networking tool in a bad economy.
The fastest-growing demographic on the site?
Women 55 and older, up 175% since September 2008. Cynics might say that if Granny is on Facebook, the site absolutely has jumped the shark. Quite the contrary: Having a broad swath of users is exactly what Facebook wants. The arrival of an older, less Web-centric crowd suggests that it has succeeded in making the site easy to use.
Source: FORTUNE, March 2, 2009