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October 05, 2007
Musings on Facebook from an 8th-grader
Brian Kong is 13 and in 8th grade at a school in Palo Alto. He's been participating in our lab for the past month and helping us understand the psychology of Facebook across different age groups. Here is a summary he's written of his findings, and some of his ideas for how to improve Facebook.
- Dan AG
As a 13 year old, I'm pretty sure I'm not part of Facebook's target population. However, more and more, I think that I'm beginning to understand why some of my friends started using Facebook, and what persuades more to join. Most of my friends use Facebook for one primary one reason: to tell about their lives and look at the ones that their friends or classmates live. Facebook is picking up success right now among my peers, because during the long summer break when my friends couldn't hang out or verbally update each other on what we did, we needed to find a newer, quicker outlet to keep in touch. This summer for me, the new outlet was Facebook. The word spread through emails and the urge to be part of this new "trend" caused many of us to join. After joining, we realized that it was a great site, and we stuck to it. The applications are also key to Facebook's success in capturing my attention. They provide a little more fun, such as super poke or zombie. So far, my friends are all zombies, and repeatedly try to bite me, as they probably do to other unbitten friends as well.
Facebook is great, but there are a few ways that it could be improved—maybe through new apps that others build. I would think that they should have some form of live video messaging so that the chatters could see other through a web cam. And then, maybe on the side of the video chat window, there would be a small summary of the other person's recent adventures, allowing people easy access to personalized conversation topics. They can even have an area on the screen that links or displays what chatters are currently discussing, such as a picture, an URL, a word document, a video, etc. This would be even cooler than a face to face conversation, and help increase communication and collaboration.
A few new features might also help Facebook expand. There should be some feature where based on your interests, a matchmaking game is set up. It brings you together with another random person with the same hobbies, and makes this little game to help you understand each other better and work as a team. This would also cause more friendships to be made over Facebook, increasing the time that a person would want to spend on Facebook. Of course, this idea is just one out of many, but features like this are generally what would make Facebook more popular and used over longer periods of time.
--- Brian Kong
Posted by Dan at October 5, 2007 03:57 PM