All 100 Million Facebook Users Are Bloggers
By Matt Jones on Sep 21, 2008 in Blogging Ideas
According to Facebook’s statistics page there are over 100 million active users. It seems to me more and more that the “New Facebook”, love it or hate it, has become a microblogging platform. The news feed dominates the profile page and is essentially the foundation of a blog.
Below is the definition of “blog” from Wikipedia
“A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual [1], with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order”
By that definition, the only aspect that prevents a Facebook profile being called a blog is… wait there isn’t one!
Indeed you wouldn’t call a Facebook profile a Web site, it is part of a Website, but then company blogs are only a part of their Website and yet they are still blogs. I am very surprised that few other bloggers haven’t made this connection. Facebook users, i.e. people we consider “normal” and “mainstream” are in fact bloggers too.
The question is, how far away is a decent app or Facebook update that lets you turn your Facebook profile into a blog as we know it with more text content? All that needs doing is the option to publish longer status updates combined with a simple text editor (which isn’t even essential as web browsers can do most of that). From a blogging perspective, Facebook has something to compete with Google’s Blogger. Has Facebook realized they have a huge army of content creators, waiting to be unleashed?
At the moment bloggers can use Facebook to promote their blog posts, for example, by posting a link with a text snippet to their post. In the future mainstream Facebook users could start a blog 100% contained within Facebook. That idea may not sound attractive to current self-hosted bloggers who want the rights to own their content, but plenty of bloggers use blogger.com, why not use Facebook when/if it becomes fully available?
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Totally agreed.
Many of my friends ask me why I don’t do anything with my facebook profile and I’m like:
“Facebook are for people who are not smart enough to start their own blogs.”
Their model works because it is intuitive and allows for easy networking, which is hard for blogs to do.
The number of bloggers on facebook is going to continue to grow if the well known bloggers continue to use it. Facebook unlimited itself when they allowed ANYONE and EVERYONE to register.
-Mike
[…] perusing through my google reader feeds, I came across Matt Jones‘ post on… Facebook users are all bloggers. and this made me think… yeah, that’s really true, Considering all these friends that […]
To take your last point one step further, you can get a RSS feed application that feeds your posts into your facebook news section.
I use Facebook to view my daughter’s photos from overseas. While I accept friend requests, my main purpose is to keep in touch with my daughter.