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Facebook tries to grow up, should you care?

I’ll just be honest about it: I’m way too old to have joined as an undergrad — or even grad student, either time. But I’m in facebook now.

A couple of weeks ago, facebook opened up to certain companies, and now there are nearly two thousand registered companies. I wonder how many corporate registrants are doing what I’m doing — logging on to check things out and get a first-hand look at what has been going on inside the walled garden. Yes, I’m saying I joined facebook for work. I am aware this sounds vaguely like “I only buy Playboy for the articles” but in this case it really is true. As a message on another Intuit employee’s facebook wall says, “I’m not Facebooking at work, I’m researching Web 2.0!”

Research purposes aside, I’m not clear on what facebook’s value for worker bees vs college students is. (Why facebook wants us is clearer: the college student market is only so big, and it turns over every few years. Expanding the potential user base means more eyeballs, and as we know, more eyeballs + [magic tricks!] = self-sustaining profitable web enterprise.

My initial impression is that facebook hasn’t thought through the expansion into corporate markets. If they have, it sure isn’t showing in their interface yet. “Whatever I can get” and “Random Play” are not options I want to see connected with my job in any way. I can imagine the utility behind the potential NSFW stuff repurposed for work-related stuff easily enough, so instead of going down the sexual harrassment path, you could:

• indicate you want to find people interested in working on a project using certain technologies
• indicate you want to find people solving particular problems
• indicate you want to find people exploring certain questions
• tag yourself with your areas of expertise
• tag yourself with topics you want to learn more about
• list yourself as being willing to mentor or coach others
• say you are looking for a mentor or coach

I think the photo album feature has limited value, but again tweaking that functionality and instead creating a portfolio could be quite useful. People could upload presentations, proposals, and other documents they have created. (Bonus points for being able to tag portfolio items.) This gets to the real problem I see for facebook in corporate markets: for it to be the most useful, it needs to be able to handle company confidential information.

Back when I worked for The Incredible Shrinking Company, we had something called the Facepage. It consisted of a headshot, name, phone extension, and I think email address link. Before all the shrinkage, people needed it to match names with new faces in the hall. Even in the hire-every-ten-minutes days, the company was still small enough that other data wasn’t really necessary. But in large companies, discovering who knows what (even more than who knows who) can be a real problem. A self-edited profile a la facebook living behind the firewall would go a long way toward solving the knowing who knows what problem.

In public, facebook’s main competitor now is the current 800 pound gorilla of social software, MySpace. (That’s right, I’m discounting yesterday’s professional social software buzz baby LinkedIn.) It’s worth noting the main differences between facebook and MySpace:

• Control — facebook exerts more of it. Who’s in, who can’t get in, what everything looks like
• Names — facebook insists on people using their real names, but you can be anyone you want with any username you choose on MySpace
• Design — facebook doesn’t suffer from fork-in-the-eye design problems, but then, it doesn’t offer the level of user customization that MySpace does
• Multimedia — Facebook gives you a photo album, MySpace give you music and video
• Advertising — I’m sure I’ll see some advertising eventually, but Facebook doesn’t have the ridiculously blinky ads MySpace is slathered with
• Activity — facebook lets you “poke” people (a way of saying “hey” without actually saying anything) leave messages, and post some photos, but there isn’t that much to do. MySpace has blogging, videos, music, events — not sure how much there really is to do there either, but it gives the impression of more activity on a much wider playing field

If you can get in, should you join facebook? I don’t know. I’m not sure facebook will do much for me in the long run but YMMV, you are probably more social than me (most people are). It won’t be useful or much fun if you don’t know other people on it, or have a web geek job, or an anthropological interest in social software. But do try asking the folks where you work in charge of the intranet why your directory can’t do the things facebook can.