Purely Anecdotal #256: The Power of Facebook

This is purely anecdotal…

But, recently I was reading on a friend’s blog about how much they liked the facebook chat tool and how it had changed their lives.

Basically, this person had never really used IM chat before. The reason was that it involved installing new software and learning a new communications paradigm.

Facebook’s footer toolbar forces chat on its users, and it does so in a way that’s more intuitive than the built-in chat interfaces in google mail, yahoo! mail, or AOL.

Facebook continues to grow exponentially and attract a wider demographic of users. It may struggle to monetize as effectively as more established content powerhouses, but the latent power of the platform to achieve experiences like that of my friend are really amazing successes that will continue to entrench Facebook as THE social network, regardless of its current size relative to MySpace, Google, or Yahoo! in terms of the number of users.