I’ve been rather fascinated with Facebook in the last couple of weeks. I’ve always been interested in Social Networking sites (or SNS), but I usually don’t stay interested for long. In fact, I am so interested in Facebook that I broke my cardinal rule of Social Network services: “don’t invite anyone.”  I only ever make links with people who I already find on there, because if I invited all of my friends to every SNS that I tried, they’d hate me. This is the first one that I find myself consulting on a regular basis.

I had a conversation last night with I friend I’d invited who didn’t quite get the point. It was interesting to discuss, because it made clear the divide between people who live their lives substantially connected to the internet and those who don’t. I’m online all the time, and I take access for granted. Jeanne has a different kind of job, where her access is mostly “hit it and quit it,” and she hasn’t developed a home-life pattern which involves being online that much. I know there are still a lot of people like that, but they are going to be going the way of people who grew up in the radio era and never quite took to television real soon now.

Being online as much as I am, I like the loose sense of presence Facebook offers. And there’s a Facebook toolbar for Firefox which can increase the presence, to the point of, if you choose, popping up a brief alert when your friends do things like change their profile or their status. More functional, you can pop out a sidebar that shows your friends profile photos and current Facebook status. I like this because a lot of my friends aren’t in Chicago, and I have always fallen short on my desire to maintain contact with friends who have moved away. (I’m not even always so great about the friends here in town, but I’m workin’ on it…) These little tidbits of information are a welcome reminder of the bonds I have with these diverse people. It’s just nice to see photos of my friends out of the corner of my eye.

I’m also just impressed by the architecture of Facebook. It is clearly designed with use cases in mind. The idea of “social use cases” is perhaps a bit odd, because it’s a pretty new thing. Before the internet, social interactions were much more involved, and it would be mostly poetic to describe things like “host a formal caller in the parlor” as a “use case.”

But for people who have ready access to the internet, and a lot of friends who do, it’s pretty easy to conceive of social applications, as can be seen by the explosion of offerings since they announced their platform less than a month ago. While many of them are kind of inane, many also clearly tap into things people recognize they want. There are applications for listing books or movies that you like, or want to see, and you can easily cross-reference with your friends, for example, to borrow a book you’ve been meaning to read.

There are obvious questions of scale, as well as the continuing annoyance of rating things like movies over again (and someone tell the developer of that Flixster Movies app to fix his randomizer; the quick-rate system goes through movies in the same order every time you hit it!). But I think people will recognize the potential enough that they’ll just work on those problems instead of writing them off as being too hard to get started. That’s why we call them “software platforms” – they help you start off at a higher level.