Gosh, I now have over 150 friends. Who would have thought it, eh? Still no one in Africa or South America though.

Of course friending someone on Facebook is even less meaningful than friending someone on LiveJournal. At least on LJ you have a reasonable idea that your friends read your journal. On Facebook they might keep up with what you are doing, but there is so much else going on that they probably only skim highlights. Really all friending does is allow you to communicate through the Facebook system, which is of limited use. Recently I’ve had a few people friend me that I’m pretty sure I’ve never met or corresponded with. I accepted the requests anyway. As with LJ, I’m not putting anything on my Facebook account that I’m not happy to have seen by the general public.

But the point of this project was to see how Facebook works as a viral marketing system, and the answer seems to be “not very well.” Over at Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss is talking about Facebook Fatigue:

Unfortunately, even as older strategies prove not to be magic bullets after all, newer strategies don’t supplant them–they merely expand the field of self-promotional activity, adding to the burden of non-writing tasks that writers must fit into their schedules.

The reality, of course, is that there is no such thing as a magic bullet. What Facebook (and systems like it) do, I think, is provide a vector. If there is a powerful meme about, Facebook can spread it really fast. But in and of itself it can’t make something popular.

A few more numbers are in order. The Matter competition that I mentioned a while back still has only 153 entries, despite the deadline being extended to Feb 27th. That’s still very good odds for 10 free copies of the book. (Simon, if you happen to be reading this, I’m going to buy a copy shortly, so if my name gets drawn ignore it.) Equally the Hugo Awards group that Kevin and I set up has only 69 members.

There are good reasons for the lack of activity. Firstly, people need to be prodded. I might have missed the Banks thing if Paul Cornell hadn’t prompted me. But there is so much stupid crap going on on Facebook that I suspect many people are reluctant to send out any messages to their friends. One of the simplest things that Facebook could do to make it a better tool for marketing is ban all of those applications that require you to invite a bunch of your friends before you can install them, and then sends those friends whiny messages promising to tell on you to your friend who will be so upset if you don’t sign up. It really is school playground stuff.

Another real problem is that once you have set up a group, a fan page or an event there isn’t a lot you can do with it. Really the best thing it can do it direct people to a proper web site where you can do all sorts of fun and interesting stuff, which of course is not what Facebook wants.

On the other hand, Facebook isn’t completely useless. I do manage to keep up with what some people are doing through it. I’ve also found things on there that I didn’t know existed. And I quite like the Causes application. It is a good way of reminding me to do good things every so often. I should do more of that.