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The two groups battling for the soul of Facebook

Broadly speaking, there are two groups, who are not exactly battling but who will eventually decide the future of Facebook.

In one corner, there are the ‘original’ Facebookers – the Young and the Restless College Crowd, who were the first to adopt Facebook, happily exhibiting their ‘cars, abs, and/or drinking abilities’, eager to see how their high school friends are doing in life (later, when out of college, always happy if the friends are not doing any better than them).

In the opposite corner are the 'late-on-scene','I-am-too-self-important-for-this-town' crowd from Silicon Valley and elsewhere – the self promoters (Valleywag’s pet peeves Calacanis and Scoble), the PR hacks, the Venture Capitalists who felt being left out by the hip web 2.0 crowd.

Owen Thomas describes this crowd in glowing terms:

(the self promoters are) spamming the less-important people who have volunteered to be your "friends" -- people who are really just fans, to whom you have no meaningful relationship.

It will be interesting to find out how this battle between the ‘natives’ and the ‘geezers’ plays out – may be, we shall again get to read a superfluous essay on the class wars and social netwroking sites, this time on Facebook.

Related:
The Bubble Boys and Girls of Facebook
Web 2.0, Facebook, and the Frog who got out of the well
Platform Wars 2.0: your Platform is just a widget on mine
A-Listers: Navel Gazing dies hard

Labels: facebook, social networking, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:04 PM