Just yesterday, Michelle Slatalla of The New York Times posted an article about her joining Facebook – where her daughter & friends have had accounts for quite a while. Her reason? Probably best put in her own words:
So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.1
But adults – and more specifically, parents – don’t belong on Facebook. Not because the system isn’t built for people over 30 nor because adults aren’t interested in moving existing relationships online, but only because Facebook and other Web 2.0 social network sites for students (and teens, too) are now what the mall was five years ago.
While Ms Slatalla goes off on a tangent, choosing to discuss the existence of mother-daughter ties online and her own troubled past (or something), there is a bigger picture there: why Facebook is so popular. Web 2.0 is all about taking things for real-life and putting them online.
Photo albums? Flickr. Diaries? Blogs. Home videos? YouTube. Book store? Amazon. Auction? eBay. And so on and so forth. So what does that make Facebook? Why Mall 2.0 of course!
Emphasis added. ↩