The Psychology of Social Computing: What Best Explains the Success of Facebook?
This interesting article on Social Computing Magazine points out the motivations that create attract young generation to Facebook, one of the hottest social networking sites now. This also serves as a list of good features of the site:
- Collecting. Members collect friends, or "relationships between people", similar to collecting Pokemon and stamp, in that it taps into the basic psyche of collecting things.
- Not invited to the party. Facebook also digs away at the insecurities in people... This may be amplified by the lie-awake-at-night worry that your peers can see your profile on Facebook, and while they may have 50, 100, 200 friends they will mockingly see that you have a pathetically small number.
- Twitching curtains - Curiosity. Facebook is up-front about letting you keep an eye on what your friends are up to. There's a status box. You type in – if you want – what you are doing. There's another page where the most recent updated status of your friends are listed.
- People like us. Facebook users are of wide range of age groups, making members feel comfortable with "peers who are very roughly within my age range".
- Autobiography. Once you've linked up with a few people, then Facebook creates a "Social Timeline." This shows when and who and why you ended up meeting with Facebook people.
- Expansion is quick, easy and free. Adding new functionality is done within Facebook... It takes literally seconds, which means that an application of interest can be very quickly experimented with. Several times one installed, played with, and uninstalled applications in under 2 minutes. Therefore, it appeals to people who like to tinker and experiment, but don't have the time, inclination, knowledge, attention span or geekiness to mess about with anything technical.
Teenage Sex - A so True and Hilarious Analogy of Knowledge Management
Being in the Knowledge Management (KM) community of my company for a few years now, I have to admit that there is hardly any better analogy than that of a CIO about KM:
"Knowledge management is like teenage sex," he says. "Everyone is talking about it all the time, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, almost no one is really doing it although everyone is bragging about it, and those who are doing it aren't doing it very well."
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