Stephen Collins has been telling me to get onto Facebook now for a while. I finally succumbed last night after Steve mentioned the Facebook group for the Canberra Coworking Space concept.
I invited everyone I know who I thought might be interested.
Paola Kathuria and I correspond via the SIGIA-L list every now and then. In asking who I was and how I came to Facebook, she and I started a conversation on the true worth of Facebook. I think between us we decided that we weren’t quite sure of the true worth - whether it was a truly valuable thing or not. In the end, I suggested that Facebook was a flag that showed us where the social computing wind was blowing this week.
So here is my extrapolation of this: Boyd’s Law of This Week’s Hottest Social Computing App - social computing applications are massive social experiments that provide us with data so that we can understand the nature of social computing, and anything else that we get out of them is a bonus.
This definition is a little bit existentialist - the thing exists to prove the existence of the thing, and allow analysis of the thing. In this case, the thing is social computing. Whatever the thing is, we’re out there creating it - and just as Altavista gave way to Yahoo, and Yahoo to Google, so MySpace will give way to something like Facebook, and Facebook to the Next Big Thing. Will LinkedIn be replaced by the new business-oriented Facebook applications? Probably.