The Zeitgeist

This past Sunday’s NYTimes has a great article on FaceBook’s changing demographics.  The article starts out talking about the social “ick” factor for some 20-somethings that their Moms are on FaceBook (I’ve seen this first hand — a college friend of mine found her 18yr old daughter berating her — online on FaceBook no less –  for “friending” her friends, demanding to know why she “needed” to be on FaceBook), but quickly moves on to an interesting observation about how FaceBook as a connection medium is moving out side of the friend-tagging and sexual hookup phase an into something more interesting.

Like many Internet tools FaceBook is making that transition from a service started by a bunch of geeks to a service that’s defined by (and some could say co-opted by) its users.   Apropos of the article I wrote last week linking to  Joe Davison’s peice on FaceBook v. commercial FaceBook Apps, this could get very interesting very fast.  As people change the definition of what FaceBook is and does, what will FaceBook do?  Will it clamp down on it’s users?  Will it find a way to embrace all the various avenues that the user community are going to drag it in? Or, will the users themselves come to the conclusion that FaceBook itself was just a convenient social lubricant and go off and find better more expressive tools for furthering their ends…

Tags: FaceBook, Social Networks, User Defined Communities