Is Facebook For Games?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 11th, 2007 1:07 PMWhen the Facebook platform first launched, many people in the blogosphere claimed that Facebook would soon emerge as the social operating system. While that still may occur, some even suggested that Facebook would eventually have highly useful applications that would contribute to productivity. Whether it be enterprise applications or less robust applications such as Zoho, a number of bloggers expressed the future expansion of Facebook into the workplace.
While Facebook has indeed entered the workplace, it’s not for the benefit of employers necessarily. If you take a look at the Zoho Office application on Facebook, there were only 39 active daily users yesterday. A far cry from the close to 60,000 users playing the Attack! application. So what do Facebook users want to do when they are logged into the site? They either want to check out what their friends are doing or socialize.
If you take a look at the most popular applications on Facebook currently, all of them appear to be for entertainment purposes. If you speak with the majority of Facebook application development shops, the most successful applications that they are building are ones that are meant to entertain users. There are also a few useful applications but the majority of those applications revolve around socializing nonetheless. Do you think Facebook will eventually become the web operating system or will it remain as a site that is for socializing and games?
November 11th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I like WarBook best..
November 11th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Actually, all social web sites are games. The book “The Web: Hidden Games” (http://www.lulu.com/content/1269306) tries to look at them from game perspective. Certainly, it’s only one perspective among many.
November 11th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Get outta my head!
I commented to a friend two nights ago over dinner that it might just wind up that the Facebook platform amounts to nothing more than a way to integrate games with Facebook.
Don’t tell Lee I said that.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:30 am
[…] I questioned if Facebook has turned into a site for games and entertainment. This application supports the […]
November 12th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
[…] I suggested that Facebook is for fun and the odds of people using the site for productivity purposes are slim to none. While I still […]