Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, after having overtaken rival network MySpace. But in the last one year, Facebook has grown to be much more than just a pure social network. It is now also the largest photo sharing site besides becoming a strong contender in the microblogging & lifestreaming space.
Facebook as a Social Network
Facebook continues to hold the honour of being the largest and the fastest growing social network in the world. As of June this year, they had 132 million unique visitors, having grown by 153% in the last year. It does what all other social networking services do: building online communities of people who share interests and activities and provide a variety of ways to find your friends and interact with them.
Facebook as a Photo Sharing Site
Facebook, recently announced that it hosts a total of 10 billion photos which makes it the largest photo sharing site in the world. So now its not Flickr or Picasa or Photobucket, but Facebook which hosts the maximum photos on the internet.
This is a worrying sign for plain vanilla photo sharing social networks such as Flickr and Picasa. Of course, Flickr & Picasa have many additional features which Facebook lacks but Facebook becomes much more convenient to share photos with your friends. It’ll be interesting to see what photo sharing social networks will do to differentiate from Facebook.
Facebook as a Lifestreaming App
You can now aggregate your social content into Facebook from several services such as Flickr, Picasa, del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader and your blog. Even though bloggers constantly comment about FriendFreed, Facebook looks like the one to take lifestreaming mainstream. It may not support the number of serrvices as Profilactic, but for the majority of Facebook’s users, the site’s own lifestreaming functionality will definitely suffice.
Facebook as a Microblogging App
Facebook’s ‘What are you doing right now?’ feature providing status updates about your friends is extremely similar to Twitter. Similar to lifestreaming, Facebook also seems likely to take microblogging mainstream.
Facebook as an Application Platform
Facebook has more than 24,000 applications hosted developed by more than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs.
Conclusion
It is no secret that Facebook has been pushing its microblogging and lifestreaming services to the forefront of its site recently. Its competitors such as Orkut are also trying to play catchup by introducing status updates and photo sharing features similar to Facebook. But with the user scale and the geographical spread available to it, Facebook could turn out to be the real leader in social networking services.
Related Posts
Posted under Social Networking
Posted by Nikhil Pai on October 26, 2008
