This summer I took a long break from blogging and much of social media with one big exception: Facebook. FB has, in just a few months, become the default communications medium for my wide range of friends, replacing email completely. It is also the central place for announcing events, sharing photos, images, articles and video and arranging meetups (yes we actually hang together in the ‘real’ world!). My friends who blog post their new pieces on FB and a lot of Twitter activity is rerouted there. Of course you can Tweet from Facebook. So why use any other service?

Update: Facebook has 300 million users and is now making money.

That’s a good question and I think I can partially answer it. Facebook is all about real time. You literally can’t save things that are hours or even days old without a lot of searching. It’s a stream, not a content manager. So when you need to store content that you and others want to recover in the future, FB is probably not the place.

Facebook Groups and Pages are quasi-websites that can be information sources but they are not searchable by the engines and you must join to get updates- so they don’t replace conventional websites. My recent project for an area business association was built on a wiki platform as that was the easiest way to handle the type of info it distributes. I was asked about a Facebook Page for them and we may do one just for event announcements- and embed it into the wiki site.

Though it isn’t perfect as an informational site or a transactional site, Facebook is rapidly becoming the point of entry onto the web for many, many people- a sort of infinitely expandable portal. If they can’t build a major business around that they should give me a call!