Montreal Tech Watch

I was yesterday at FacebookCampMontréal, an initiative by Sylvain Carle, CTO and cofounder of Praized. Developers and marketers were invited to brainstorm about facebook at the SAT, and boy… it looked like every other marketing agency in Montréal had one representative there.

Now this is not a report about what happenned at the event, but more about my thoughts about Facebook, about all the hypeexcitement, and what might come in the next few months.

First, I think the key when talking about Facebook is first trying to understand why they succedeed, while every other social networking website “failed”. For me, this is mainly due to the fact that every profile in facebook is a real person. Facebook first started with colleges, and it was compulsory to use your student email address; they also designed it so that your first actions were to provide your first and last names. In their next stage, they expanded outside universities, but the focus was still on providing key information that made sure to everyone you were real. By making sure that a profile page represented a unique person, and not a fake internet login ID, it provided a sense of trust for every user.

Trust was also built by the fact that you had only exposure to your immediate social circle. Compare this to hi5, myspace, or flickr, where you have access to everyone’s profile, pictures, videos, their whereabouts and their friends. These were designed on the assumption that if first-time users stumbled on these pages, they would see how the website was full of content, and would then sign up as a user. But at the end, the website’s owner only gets what he wished for: casual users who would never engage in the website.

Notice the emphasis on engagement here. The web has always been a jungle made up of pages generated by programs, spam software, ads, or people you have no connections with. For the first time, you get access to a controlled and walled area where you interact with people you have met, lived with or known before signing up to the website.

I have seen various posts (too many to link them here) where the bloggers proclaimed this was the honeymoon phase and that after playing and being entertained around, people would move on. My conclusion today is that these bloggers are fundamentally wrong. I had conversations yesterday with Simon Law, Georges Favvas and other entrepreneurs, and my take is that facebook is not a social network. No, it doesn’t play in the same league as myspace or hi5. It’s rather an utility, that is designed to support your social life, taking care of your appointements, the events you are going to, and keep in touch with people you know. Please notice that I haven’t used the word friends here, but the more general word people. Mark Zuckerberg made it clear by introducing Social Ads and Pages that Facebook goes beyond your friends — although it’s still made for people you’ve really met&known.

Of course, this is just my take, and my explanation on why there are more people coming to a facebookcamp than a barcamp. Mark Zuckerberg is a brilliant application designer and entrepreneur and OpenSocial is not really going to do anything about it, because all the other social networks are flawly designed in nature.