Is Facebook a social “superpower”?

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Thu, Dec 03 2009 | 4 Comments

When Facebook was founded in 2004, it was meant to be a way for college students to connect with the friends that they had left who had gone to other colleges, however it has become an insane social tool that everyone (including my parents) have subscribed to.

Facebook may be looking into becoming an operating system for communications as far as personal computers are concerned. This means that Facebook wants to become as much as a part of your life as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, or other companies that have become household names.

Last week Facebook let its users see a version of its search software that allows members to search news links as well as other topics that users have updated in real time. This feature is not just limited to friends, but to the network of over 250 million users. I can’t forget to mention that the social networking site has acquired FriendFeed. FriendFeed is similar to the rival social site Twitter. It allows users to bring together all their favorite content from other websites or blogs as well as services to one place so all their other friends can see it.

Once upon a time, Facebook was started as a group of Harvard students sitting in a room together who had a great idea. It was meant for people who were in college and had college email addresses to sign up. Now the site is open to anyone over the age of 13. This, of course, has brought in some heat from previous users who didn’t want to be friends with their younger siblings, but it has since grown to them not wanting to be friends with their parents, or worse yet…grandparents.

Facebook has also seen its fair share of criticism with the implementation of the news feed, which was seen by many as a “stalker feed” type of thing where anyone who you were friends with (or sometimes not) could see what you were doing on Facebook. However, over time, this made Facebook an application that many people sought out the site for, and it eventually made the site much more relevant.

Facebook has had plenty of opposition from other social networking sites. MySpace was supposed to be the greatest social networking site on the internet, but is now seen (by many) as a dirty place that many people don’t go anymore. Twitter serves a single purpose, and not much more than that.

I think that Facebook is already a social networking superpower and over time it will be seen if the company can keep it up or let it slip away from them.

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Tags: social tool, household names, harvard students