Facebook! Why now?
I have had a love/hate relationship with social networking sites. Friendster was an awesome idea, but the performance just killed it for me (and many others!). Then came Orkut and I pride myself (seriously 
) in knowing that I was one of the earlier members of the Iranian community [i think i was 2nd] which at one point was the second largest nationality on the service (behind Brazilians). But that fondness didn’t last long. The excessive messages and lack or granular control on messaging just became too much.
The second wave for me started with MySpace’s explosion to popularity. I opened this new site in my browser and my eyes nearly went blind. The horrendous UI was enough to keep me out. Facebook never really made it into my radar until it was very popular as I was not really in contact with college crowds at the time.
I had heard good things about the new features on Facebook and how people can’t live without it, etc. Then today I read an article on it in WSJ (warning: behind paid-wall). One thing that struck me as checkout-worthy, was Mark Zuckerberg’s suggestion that his company soon will become a massive publisher!
Whatever, you can start weaving together real events into stories. As these start to approach being stories, we turn into a massive publisher. Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that’s like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence.
A massive publisher is not how most of social networks describe themselves. I sensed that he might be actually onto something here. So, I took the bullet and signed up today! I know I am very late to this party. But I didn’t want to miss a turning point in media industry if it happens to happen like Mark is predicting 
.
Facebook me, I guess!
