Mike English's blog

What makes Facebook so important? It seems that conversations about social networks always circle back to Facebook somehow. Why?

Well, I see a few reasons for this. First, Facebook has what is probably the most valuable social graph data. Accurate names and profiles are maintained by most of the users. I speculate that by slowly rolling out the service among colleges, and focusing on being a social utility, Facebook encouraged this social behavior. They didn’t add too many features or too many users too fast. As new users joined the network they copied the behavior of the earlier adopters, which was to provide accurate data.

But accuracy isn’t everything. You can find accurate profiles on LinkedIn for example, but LinkedIn doesn’t have the reach Facebook does. Facebook has penetrated the social networking market especially among college students (the original target audience) to such an extent that it is treated as a given, a ubiquitous utility, the way Google is treated for search. Facebook has entered the college student’s vernacular lexicon as a verb.

This is why Facebook is important. Not just because it’s done such a great job perfecting the social UX, – a vast improvement over MySpace‘s earlier efforts – but because ‘everyone you know’ is on Facebook, maintaining fairly accurate profiles.

It’s the data. Real data about real-world contacts.