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May 03, 2008
Facebook as a platform for Synchronous communications
Since the launch of Facebook, I looked to Facebook primarily as an asynchronous communications platform. A platform where I could update my status, share it with friends and have that affect the way I communicate with them and the way they communicate with me. During the past year, Facebook has become the platform that I use as my primary communications channel.
With the introduction of Facebook Chat, Facebook is also a synchronous communications platform which represents a subtle shift in how I and I am sure others will be approaching Facebook in the future.
Since the introduction of Facebook Chat, depending upon the time of day and day of the week, somewhere between 3 to 7 percent (150 to 350+) of my friends are online. I have enjoyed the spontaneous nature of chat and have found it to be another great touch point and another great way to stay in contact with friends across multiple time zones. What I find intriguing is that I continue to have chat conversations with people who I otherwise don’t message with on a regular basis. I have also had several instances of a conversation which started on twitter moving to Facebook Chat.
With Facebook shifting from a platform for asynchronous communications to a platform that supports both synchronous and a synchronous communications, this is becoming a place much closer to the space I expected Facebook to one day occupy. It will be real interesting to watch as Facebook opens up their API to support asynchronous communications and the types of applications which are developed as a result of it.
Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on May 3, 2008 04:36 PM | Permalink
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Comments
I think the next logical steps for Facebook chat will be to:
1. Allow group chats
2. Let users SHARE their chat sessions with other users (with the consent of ALL chat participants).
Now THAT will be something new in the market.
(And that's ANOTHER facebook application I'll never write)
Posted by: Eliram at May 4, 2008 03:32 AM
I'm not on Facebook, but I suspect that the most resilint tools will be those that can operate synchronously AND asynchronously. For example, you can engage in Twitter in real time, or you can check Twitter once a day and respond to the last day's stuff.
Posted by: Ontario Emperor at May 4, 2008 03:13 AM