This slightly misses my point. I’m not arguing that we should ignore FaceBook – it has its uses for millions of people. I’m arguing that it does not follow that we should necessarily advocate it’s use to support teaching and learning in HE for example. There are reasons why it might not be appropriate.

Like you, I have never built a web application as globally popular as FaceBook. But I have built very successful webapps in an HE context. Different success criteria, different constraints, different priorities. When I was happily building webapps for HE, at no point did we ask ourselves, “yes, but will this help us become massively, globally succesful?”. Quite right too – our success criteria involved making a few thousand users very happy.

Nor should we assume what our audiences want from us, just because they all use FaceBook. In my post above I linked to a post by Owen Stephens who cites a report suggesting how wrong such assumptions can be….

The Journal of X can be completely successful if it used by everyone with a close interest in X without needing to enjoy circulation figures of the DM.

It’s a bit of a sneaky point (as I know a man of your vast intelligence recognises) – the comparison with DailyMailness is guaranteed to wind me up, as DM readers are undoubtedly the spawn of Satan..

The reason it’s not a comparison which carries much weight is of course that the conversation isn’t about the content. I’m not endorsing (or otherwise) the content on Facebook. What I am suggesting in my usual, slightly simple way, is that HE (anyone!) would be *incredibly stupid* to ignore Facebook. However much us tech snobs (Marieke’s point) think FB is “just a little last year”, we shouldn’t underestimate the absolutely huge impact that it has had to normal people. Facebook has done something more right that ANYTHING any of us has managed to do, been involved in or seen since the dawn of the internets. I’ve been doing this shit for 10 years now and nothing has come close to having the real-world impact that this site has had. Google is possibly another example which has, but it’s not in the content business, so can’t be compared, IMO.

Whatever the reason: timing, luck, design, virality, marketing, Facebook is bigger than huge. Hence the 100 million comment: I wasn’t trying to imply that “because 100 million people like it, it is ‘right’”, just that 100 million people is an enormous chunk to ignore for the sake of some niche argument about content ownership and portability which *those same users* couldn’t give a crap about.

The next phase of the argument: “SHOULD these people care about this stuff?” is a whole different discussion. And yes, there should (maybe?!) be some education about T&C’s, privacy, portability and so on. But right now, the position is: “yes, they should, but no they don’t”. We can either capitalise, or argue ourselves into a niche corner that ignores our current audiences’ requirements and expectations. I know where I think we should be…