The hottest site on the internet needs to do more than share chatter, says linton chiswick |
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Every day, 150,000 people join the Facebook social networking site. Many enthusiastically upload personal information - cultural and consumer tastes, photos and videos - to create a profile page to share with friends and acquaintances.
Some will have arrived in response to an invitation from one of the 150,000 members who joined the day before, or the day before that. Others will have had their curiosity piqued by the torrent of media coverage, for Facebook is the new media story of 2007.
Whether they've thought about it or not, they're joining a global, 21st-century Domesday Book... an evolving snapshot of the internet generation.
What Facebook can do for marketing is obvious. What it can do for us remains confused. Facebook is a tangled web.
Launched in 2004 as an online social network for American students, Facebook
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| For a website about identity, Facebook is having an identity crisis itself |
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consists of evolving networks of 'friends'. One member clicks another's 'Add to Friends' button, and if the other member accepts the invitation, they join each other's network.
From inside the network they can chat, blog and comment on each other's profiles. Simple, streamlined, fun, Facebook was a hit.
When it decided last September to throw open its doors to anybody with an email address, the demographic inevitably aged as
rapidly as the membership swelled.
Then, drawn like moths to a flame, Silicon Valley's movers-and-shakers turned Facebook into a
new and buzzy venue for professional networking. The demographic changed again.
And here lies the problem: two successive demographic changes have given a website that's all about identity an identity crisis.
Sitting between the uglier, more juvenile MySpace and the stuffier business networking site LinkedIn, Facebook has drawn traffic from both. A recent survey suggested that 60 per cent of members aged 25-or-over have some business colleagues among their network of friends. LinkedIn provides an application 
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