The Continuing Evolution of Facebook
In less than a decade’s time, the Facebook user base has surpassed 800 million accounts. Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has become the beacon of the social networking arena, allowing individuals from all over the world to connect, socialize and remain in touch. Facebook users tend to be passionate about their experience and somewhat resistant to change. In fact, updates typically generate some opposition, even some complaints from change-resistant users. Despite recent complaints associated with Facebook’s most recent updates, the evolution of Facebook continues, bringing forth more features and new utilities that evolve from the theory of triadic closure.
Several updates ago, Facebook applied Triadic closure principles, which state that“If two people in a social network have a friend in common, then there is an increased likelihood that they will become friends themselves at some point in the future.”[i] From this idea, Facebook has a new feature that suggests friends based on mutual connections. This update asks users whether or not they are friends with people with whom they have shared contacts. Facebook has evolved by leaps and bounds since then. Now, when users log onto their home page, they are immediately bombarded with a constantly updating ticker of their friend’s activities on this site, ranging from wall posts to friend requests. Another new feature includes the option to choose the type of stories that will be viewed on one’s news feed. This means that users can customize whether or not more stories will appear from friends pages that you visit more often. This new feature embraces both friend networking as well as page networking based off of the strength of the user’s connection with other people. Facebook essentially tracks your page visits and based on your surfing habits, will show more stories pertaining to the pages of the contacts the user visits most. While these improvements may be viewed as highly beneficial for some and less so for others, it further enables Facebook users to customize their experience. While these recent updates were exciting, they pale when compared to what Facebook is about to launch.
The newest update involves a complete redesign of users’ profile page. As described in the attached CNN article, the new page is called Facebook Timeline. It essentially depicts various moments of users’ lives which may have taken place at any point throughout their lives. Thus, Facebook takes the power of networking one step further; by emulating memory. Facebook Timeline promises to deliver a different-in-kind user experience based on user generated decision criteria. Users can set parameters that guide which memories will be displayed and which are most important. This complex networking application relies on strong versus weak connections which can be further evaluated using the triadic closure theory.
[i] Networks textbook, p. 48