Are you facebooking?

This morning, the Fortune/CNN Money site has a very interesting analysis of the Facebook phenom, and it's worth spending your Saturday time reading it if you want to be aware of some of the factors that may play into how Facebook ends up changing our world. No, I don't mean changing it for the better or the worse, but changing the way we operate, think, and process. If you haven't already been captivated by what this article calls the "stickiness" of Facebook, perhaps you've been on a very long vacation.

Facebook started out as a place for college kids and alum to find each other, but unlike some sectors of the tech world, it's really been co-opted by a huge cross-section of the population...

But these days the folks fervently updating their Facebook pages aren't just tech-savvy kids: The college and post-college crowd the site originally aimed to serve (18- to 24-year-olds) now makes up less than a quarter of users. The newest members - the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate - are more, ahem, mature types like Lichtenstein, who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to overshare on the web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive - and a lot more fun.

If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of how technology continues to shape networking, marketing, hiring, etc., don't neglect watching social media and particularly Facebook:

[CEO Mark Zuckerberg's] ultimate goal is less poetic - and perhaps more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet's standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional - and indispensable. Your Facebook ID quite simply will be your gateway to the digital world, Zuckerberg predicts. "We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone's name, find the person you're looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that's a really valuable system to be building."

Go read the whole article, and don't miss the sidebar graphic, "The Race to the Mass Market." Astounding.

I'm outta here...gotta go update my FB status :-)

How Facebook is taking over our lives

Labels: Fun, Social Observation, Technology