k.. Finally got a moment to collect some thought’s on this Facebook thing. It’s very popular with the children, it would seem.

To us ‘net veterans the thing seems simplistic, and almost old-hat. I mean, personally I’ve been mucking around on most of the SNS’s for years and years now – especially if you include livejournal as a Social Network.

But, it’s appeal seems to be the way it gives the average person an easy/simple handle on what the rest of us having been doing with Flickr, Blogger, Last.FM and of course, lately Twitter. And, for the more pro user, it’s almost customizable enough.

And the proof is the rapidity with which I’ve been watching my previously barely online friends jump all over Facebook. These are people who’ve pretty much only used email online. And it seems like there’s a, dare i say it, paradigm shift or something happening here. Gonna be interesting to watch how this changes how the everyman’s activity online.

Now, onto some criticism of Facebook.

Firstly, there’s the whole walled-garden approach. Namely, that you can only see full profile’s of people that you’re authenticated as friends with. This is different to every other SNS ever. BUT, I can also see how much more people would be complaining about freaking Identity Theft etc if that was the case. The converse of this is it’s a great way to force people to sign up.

Secondly, why the hell can’t you override the Status with the Twitter plugin. That is teh suck.

Thirdly, what isn’t the home page AJAX’ed. I mean, apart from the high server hits, it’s just a pain in the ass. Hitting refresh is just teh suck also.

UPDATE – I forgot to say that basically Facebook has distilled the best of all the Web 2.0 apps out there and it’s now part of the mainstream. And that the last time I saw a mass movement on teh ‘net like this was the mid 90s, when suddenly everyone finally got on email…

Hillis out