Facebook Fetes DC
Facebook took a page from Google’s book and hosted a political summit today.
Will Facebook increase their DC presence like Google? Competition is great. Especially competition that involves free food and breaks from the office. If they keep doing these things, I hope that Facebook changes their presentation. Between the progressive events that I attend for work, and conservative ones for the sake of my sanity, I’ve seen the Google presentation about four times.
The turnout for the event was surprising. There was a huge line to register and find a seat. While waiting, I noticed that almost everyone was under 30. According to Facebook, 56% of the users are over 25, yet every campaign and congressional office sent younger staffers.
I’m happy to hear that changes will be made to integrate groups into the newsfeed. As much as I love Facebook, they keep adding things rather than improving some of the basic functions. They’re finally lifting the ban on messaging more than 1,000 people and working on allowing candidates to send messages to all of their supporters.
They still won’t allow groups to create profiles and are quite adamant about it! This hurts causes and advocacy groups more than anyone else. It’s frustrating to have so many wonderful tools at our disposal, but Facebook only allows political campaigns to fully use them. Nonprofits are getting more engaged in politics and launching full-scale battles over legislation and races. If Facebook wants to further the democratic process and encourage conversations, they need to get over this decision and create some type of profile for groups. The Cause application is great, and my employer was one of the first ones to sign up. However, it’s still an app and very limited in what you can do with it.
I also love how Facebook’s answer to everything is “build an application.” I don’t know if they’re really lazy or empowering their users to have a greater say in the development of the social utility.
Some of their stats are amazing.
- 200,000 people join every day and the site doubles with active users every six months.
- People spend and average of 22 minutes a day on Facebook.
- By the end of 2007, 75% of active users will be out of college.
- 41% of active users are likely to vote for a candidate if they could learn more about he or she on Facebook.
Voters want a more personable candidate. Facebook helps. All of those odd factoids that people love knowing about candidates should be on profiles. Groups are also a great opportunity to build on those microcampaigns that target key populations (i.e. women). If groups become more integrated with the newsfeed, they could be a much more powerful tool. Before Facebook went global, they were useful for organizing and spreading news. Now they’re too big and are really only good for propaganda and making statements. Just including updates in the feeds might make them useful again.
