It is interesting to see how Facebook has been evolving since its debut. I have been on Facebook since 2004, which was the very early stage of the social medium, as it was limited to college students. I was at this time a student at SUNY Oswego, part of an internatinal abroad program. Thus, in order to keep in contact with my international friends, it was important to be on Facebook, and that is the reason why I am still connected with them.
Facebook As A Network Management Tool
That was the first use of Facebook: Stay in contact with your college friends. You could in a glance know who was working where, organize events, and post pictures online. But Facebook has experienced major twists since then. It has evolved at the same pace than the Internet did.
Facebook Apps
That has been probably the major change in Facebook. In the early 2006, Facebook has decided to open its service to third party applications, which results in the creation of lots of different online games. Actually, at some point, it turned me down of Facebook: There were so many apps, Facebook personal pages looked like a mess. You had tons of applications that you could not even see what the person was actually doing. These facebook apps results of an effort to monetize the traffic generated, which was already huge at this time. But as we have seen recently with the launch of the new Facebook interface, things have once more changed.
Facebook And The Instant Web
Since then, Twitter has become the hottest hype on the web. Everybody is speaking about it, and instant web has become an important trend in social media. Knowing what your community is doing right now has become vital. And therefore Facebook adapted once more. They have removed all apps from the main personal page, to put it into a specific ones, and started creating status updates feed, as a "Friendfeed" would, in order to match with the new trend.
As a result, Facebook is evolving and isn't scared to see what are the new trends in the Internet to adapt their platform.
