Innovation in Software

If you ask the clichéd man in the street to describe his clichéd idea of Facebook user, he would remove his cliché kebab from his mouth, put down his cliché can of Carling Black Label, and through the use of awful diction and terrible grammar developed through his awfully clichéd state education he would paint a picture for you:

“Teenager, American or European, kind of person who likes to text a lot, probably quite immature, large group of friends, not much into going out getting sloshed, like wot I did when I woz a kid, innit?”

Well, remove yourself from this yob, and look at the actual figures.

North America and Europe contribute 65.8% of all Facebook users, and only around 10% of their users are teenagers. That means less than 7% of the actual Facebook user base is the cliché most of us – especially those of us in the industry – think of as their user base.

The majority are quite different. And I think once you understand the actual group using Facebook, you start to understand its popularity in some groups (and the derision it receives in others).

Obviously (given its history), people above graduation age are the norm. Most of us (myself included), use it as a platform to keep distant touch with people we ordinarily would not speak to year-to-year, never mind day-to-day or week-to-week. We are a generation of nomads, spreading out across the globe after school and University, keeping in touch with people via the light touch of the status update. Twitter is for people who are perhaps a little more frantic (and for me at least, it’s a great way to keep in touch with my peer group, people who I might not have met, but whose work I’m interested in).

It’s not, however, a tool for teenagers. Not really. They have a social group they see almost every day – they don’t want or need Facebook. Likewise, the people who don’t like Facebook are typically people who see their social groups regularly.

For those of us who are geeks, well our groups tend to be a little more dispersed. I can name friends and family in a dozen cities around the World I wouldn’t keep up with as much if FB wasn’t there. Those people who don’t have such far-flung friends, teenagers included, simply have no use for it: they can, you know, actually talk to them.

For some reason, until seeing that graph, that thought had never occurred to me.

I just left a comment on this post of Hugh Macleod’s:

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:

1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff

2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction

3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating

It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).

Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.

We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.

Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture – heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web – but I think he’s wrong on this one.

The most interesting observation from the last few months of Facebook usage for me, is how people manage their online identities: they don’t.

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this – everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this – “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look – where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.