Facebook Know How To Keep You Hooked…
Friday, May 15th, 2009
In this 21st century ‘Web2.0 social networking’ twattery world in which we live, the next big thing is only ever just around the corner. For a while it looked like Myspace would rule the roost; then everyone over 13 realised it was just a migraine-inducing way for young boys pretending to be girls to talk dirty with other young boys pretending to be girls and moved onto Facebook.
Facebook was site du jour for a while and claims to have over 200 million active users. But, and it’s a big BUT; many people soon got sick of the enforced changes that made the site a pain to use, the constant barrage of advertising and the general “fuck you” attitude of the people who run it and lo! they leaveth for Twitter.
Facebook hate this. Not least because they have to have constant flow of people through the site so that they can sell page view advertising. So they hit upon a great idea to get people logging in. Somewhere, deep in the code is a tricky little algorithm that randomly disconnects a small percentage of people from the site. Just a tiny amount remember, just 0.0001%.
But, as they happily point out, the average user has 120 friends on the site. And most of these are within a text, tweet, shout across the office, messageboard post or phone call away from being asked “is Facebook down for you as well?”. The friend innocently pops over to check, they log in happily, spend 5 minutes checking their Scrabble game and being advertised at.
Thus Facebook keep their page impressions up…