Facebook

I never have (and likely never will) understand the attraction of the kids to MySpace. As a friend of mine remarked, it is a modern day GeoCities. Sure, I love the blinking text on the dark photos, and of course I love shouting out to all mah homies. It's just, even with a translator, I can't interpret the l33t speak. I blame the public school system (for my own inability to read it, of course!)

Yesterday, I got an email from a friend, asking me to click through to their Facebook entry. You've seen this before with LinkedIn and other social networking variants... Based on a comment from another friend about Facebook a few weeks ago, I clicked through and registered to take a look.

For all of my loathing of MySpace, I have to say, Facebook is absolutely fascinating. It's simple to configure your profile. The "add a friend" core functionality has a very clean simple interface, and the ability to interact and collaborate with others seems quite easy and simple to navigate.

But the real killer aspect of this site is in it's applications. You choose applications (which are multi-user in nature) from a list, which are then installed into your profile ready for you to use and configure appropriately. For example, there is an app of "where have I been in the world", which you then can use to compare against where your friends have been in the world. You can play Texas Hold 'em tournaments with your friends. There is a lot of useful innovation and imagination here.

Between the clean interface design of the social networking side, and then the multi-user applications, the verdict: a real time waster!

You can see why Zuckerman held out!