How Facebook is educating users
Changing the behaviour of people online and trying to make them develop new habits isn't easy. Fortunately, there is Facebook. The omnipresent social network has brought several new routines and usage patterns into people's everyday internet life, that other sites and startups now are utilizing for their own purpose.
Web investor Fred Wilson today wrote in his blog that he has noticed an increasing amount of "liking" on comments left by readers. He is using the commenting system Disqus, which adds a "like" button to each comment. It is no rocket science to realise why this is happening: Facebook has conditioned people to click on the like button when they see an item that they want to express a positive emotion around. With more than 350 million members, a significant number of internet users is familiar with Facebook and its features. Half of them are logging in every day. No surprise that they get used to Facebook's functionality, and they expect other sites to offer similar features.
Another example is Facebook's news feed: News feeds are everywhere. And the best thing is that other sites don't even need to explain what the feed is about. At least Facebook users do understand that immediately.
Further examples that come to my mind where Facebook has helped the web business as a whole to educate users are status updates, (bulk) photo uploads or sharing of videos. Web geeks should make no mistake assuming that those actions don't need any education. I'm often surrounded by people with average computer/internet skills, and I know that even very small tasks can become big challenges for this pretty big user group.
Yes, Facebook didn't invent most parts of its feature set. But it brought them to a wide audience of people who haven't been in touch with them before.
Nowadays, if someone asks me if I could give a brief explanation of Twitter (that still happens very often), I ask the person to imagine a Facebook that only consists of the news feed with friend updates. Usually, they get it. Thanks Facebook.
