Users:
23,000,000
Demographic:
Facebook originally catered exclusively to the college crowd, but it now is open to all users
while maintaining a college-centric marketing base.
Design Issues:
Facebook offers an exceptionally clean and simple user interface. Every page is designed with uniformity in
mind, having blue links and blue page trim.
User profiles feature click-and-draggable applet boxes that can be rearranged to the user's liking. The site's
customizability is relatively low outside of this, as it allows for no HTML or CSS input on user pages. This makes
Facebook consistent in appearance and mitigates the issue of bad user design. There are no obtrusive advertisements on the site,
and user-placed ads that appear on the left side of the screen are usually interesting or valuable to the Facebook community.
Features: Facebook users are greeted upon login with a RSS Feed-inspired "News Feed" which
keeps them up to date with the latest developments and updates with all of their friends. This is a particularly nice feature, as it
is a one-stop place for finding all the big new things with friends.
Facebook unveiled its new Development Platform API in late May, 2007. For the first time, this allowed users and developers the opportunity
to build and place third-party applications into their profiles. The applications are varied and, for the most part, interesting. With everything
from mashups with other websites to drawing applications, this feature is growing fast and will only improve the quality of the Facebook experience.
Facebook follows the familiar friend and group paradigm, and it also offers an extensive photo-tagging system, where users can upload albums of photos
and tag all of their friends in them. Once tagged, a photo will be displayed alongside all photos of each person in the photo. Alongside friends and
groups, users can also create events which basically function like temporary groups in which people can be invited and RSVP.
Facebook also keeps track of all of your friends' birthdays and, if they choose, their "current status," a one-liner that sums up what they are up to.
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