My Facebook Story

Facebook became all the rage during my senior year at Pomona College. All of a sudden, you were some kind of a rebel if you weren’t on it.

At that point, I was kind of a Mac purist. If something rendered strangely in Safari, I didn’t think it was worth using. Facebook said that it wasn’t compatible with my browser, so I held out.

The winter after graduation, I visited with my college girlfriends in Chicago. They convinced me that I should get a Facebook account to stay in touch. Since they’d obviously fixed their Safari problems, I acquiesced. I’ve been hooked ever since.

A lot of people ask me why Facebook is so compelling. I think the easiest answer is that it offers real-time information about people you care about in a time-delayed format. My friend Debbie posts that she’s having a rough week. Two hours later, I sign in and see it and I can go post on her wall and find out what’s up and how I can help.

I haven’t seen Deb since graduation, but I can still be a good, supportive friend from 1,500 miles away in a way that wasn’t possible just a few years ago.

Another compelling feature is the “shared items” function, which allows people to suck interesting chunks of content from all over the Web into Facebook and share them with friends. As I told Robert Scoble in May, this is the definitive reason why Web 2.0 types should get Facebook accounts.

Robert has since amassed a group of contacts that threatens to reach Facebook’s limit of 5,000 friends. He’s the ultimate Facebooker because he’s transformed his profile into a hub for all of the content and information he blasts into cyberspace on any given day.

For those of us who want to build communities, this is the ultimate tool. Communities are ultimately about human connections and ongoing conversations. Facebook facilitates both.

It is not the only tool, and it’s unlikely that it will remain the most powerful tool forever. But right now it is the most exciting platform for these efforts. We look forward to discussing how it can best be used at our gathering this December.

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