I’ve been using Facebook for a week or so now, so I thought it might be useful to write a little bit about it so as to help gather my thoughts. Here are my impressions so far.

Obviously the central aspect of Facebook is the Friends system. It is a social networking application, after all. And it does seem to be quite good at connecting people. I breezed through the 100 friends mark today, and expect to go a fair way above that once everyone is back at work after the holidays. What was interesting about the process is that each new friend I added brought with them their own friends list, and that tended to have on it 3 or 4 people who I knew. The networking worked. That’s slowed down a bit now, but I’m still finding new people fairly regularly.

Of course there are always questions of etiquette. I tried to avoid asking for Friend status with people with whom I’d only exchanged one or two emails, perhaps in the process of reviewing a book. I have also steered clear of people in Finland who I think I know but am unsure of the spelling of their names so I might not; of people in Australia who I think I remember but it has been 10 years since I lived there; and of people who I think might be embarrassed by being publicly listed as a “friend” of the Great Fannish Antichrist. If I haven’t friended you yet, please don’t be offended; go ahead and friend me.

The leads on immediately to the question of, “what do I mean by ‘Friend’?” On LiveJournal it is pretty clear. A friend is someone I allow to read locked posts on my journal. But of course on LJ everyone goes by silly nicknames that make them sound like characters out of CW McColl’s “Convoy” (I haven’t found an LJ user called RubberDuck yet, but I’m sure there must be one). So on LJ when someone asks to be your friend you often have no idea who they really are, but it would be rude to say “no”. Hence my standard LJ policy of never using locked posts, because I’d never put anything in one that I didn’t want to risk becoming public.

To some extent the same is true on Facebook. A big advantage of the system is that people (generally) go by their real names, which I find a wonderful breath of fresh air. There is a supposedly sophisticated privacy system that allows you to control what can be seen by the public, by Facebook members, and by your friends, but even so you’ll tend to end up with a lot of “friends” you don’t really know well. I’ve already had one friend request from someone I don’t think I know, and who I suspect might be a new author trying to publicize his book. I accepted the request anyway. After all, he’ll end up seeing what I put out as well. And, just like LJ, I’m not going to put anything in my Facebook profile that I would not be happy putting on a public blog.

In fact with Facebook there appear to be even more serous privacy issues, and these are to do with Applications. Unlike LiveJournal, Facebook is an extendible system. You can write plugins for it. But these are not like WordPress plugins – things that you use to enhance your own site. These are largely games and “fun stuff” owned and operated by third parties. And in order to install one of these things you have to give the creator of the Application access to your profile.

I’ve been largely ignoring Applications anyway, because I don’t have the time to play games, and even if I did I would not want to spend even more hours sat in front of a computer doing so. But I have also been ignoring them because it seems obvious to me that one of the easiest ways to make money out of Facebook is to write a fun Application. You get it installed by a few hundred thousand people, and you get access to lists of their interests, their email addresses, and often their home phone numbers. That’s saleable data. [Update: I see from the Applications Terms & Conditions that Application creators are not allowed access to your contact information, though they still get just about everything else about you.] You even have your users marketing your Applications for free. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a couple of Applications I’ve looked at appear to fake Facebook notices about messages from friends in order to lure you away to their commercial sites. So I am being very wary of Applications. If I turn down your request to play a game, or don’t send greetings in return, please don’t be offended. I’m doing it to everyone.

That said Facebook clearly can be useful. It has features. I’ll get to the interesting stuff, but let’s start with what it can’t do. Facebook is a hopeless blogging platform. What it does have is something called Notes, which does allow you to write stuff, and more importantly allows you to import an external RSS feed, but it is pretty lame as far as blogging tools goes. In particular the RSS import fails to correctly render hyperlinks within the imported posts.

On the other hand, not having a decent blog system may be an advantage in some ways. With Facebook you can keep up with what your friends are doing without having to read their stories about how much they hate their jobs and look at pictures of their cats being cute.

The useful stuff is mostly in the area of viral marketing. There are various tools available. You can create a Facebook presence for a brand or company; you can create a Group that people can belong to; and you can create Events that people can signal their intention to attend.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m still unsure of the best use of these different features, in particular for promoting conventions and other SFnal stuff, but what I can do is look at how some of these features are used by other people. On the brand side, magazines such as Interzone and SFX have a presence on Facebook. What good this does them I’m not sure, but as many SF fans have them listed as friends I guess it spreads the word.

As an example of the confusion, magazines also have groups. I’m a member of groups for people who subscribe to New York Review of Science Fiction, and Ansible. Whether having a group is better or worse than having a profile for the magazine I can’t yet say, and maybe the answer is that you should have both.

Groups come in many other forms as well. Some of them are clearly political, or at least charitable, in nature. I signed up for the CarbonFund.org group because I already have my energy use offset through their organization and it makes sense to me to help promote them on Facebook too. There is also a “Causes” Application, which is one of the few that I have installed. That was because it allowed me to show public support for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a fine group of people who has helped out some of my friends, and who may be needed by others in the future.

On the events front, I see that Kathryn Daugherty has just created an event for the Denver Worldcon. I’m proud to say that for once in my life I’ve signed up for a Worldcon before Kevin (though only virtually). I’ll be very interested to see how that little corner of Facebook develops.

As I said, all of these things are viral. What I mean by that is that things spread virally very well through Facebook. Take the Worldcon Event, for example. I found it because one of my friends had already joined it. And now that I have joined it, 100 other people are going to see that I have done so. As just about all of them are SF people, the event should get many more sign-ups. I might have done some good myself too. For example, I found a group for fans of M. John Harrison. I signed up, and not long after Mike’s US editor joined the group too. I suspect she found out about it because I’m on her friends list. And I didn’t have to do anything for that to happen. Because I joined a Group, all of my friends will have automatically got notification of the fact that I did so.

How all this will develop, I’m not sure. But for now I’m reasonably encouraged. There may be an update in a week or two, once Kevin is back home (so I can see how what I do looks from another person’s profile) and I have actually set up a marketing process myself.