Peter Svarre - Strategies for your digital business

Facebook is a Christmas card

I had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend’s mother this Christmas. She is a relatively recent but very avid convert to the world of Facebook, which means that she celebrated her first Christmas while being on Facebook.

She used to be an avid Christmas card writer as well, but this year she didn’t really feel like writing Christmas cards anymore. As she said: she already felt like she was in contact with the people she needed to be in contact with…

I often have the conversation with people about how many friends you can have on Facebook. Does it make sense to have more than 20 friends? My argument is that Facebook serves two purposes: The first is to communicate and coordinate events with your close (20) friends, but the second is to keep some kind of contact (pinging) your not-so-close friends whom you may only see once a year or less often than that.

After my conversation with my girlfriend’s mother I realized that Facebook is doing exactly what Christmas cards used to do. It is maintaining a superficial but important contact to friends (or acquaintances) that we would like to keep within our friends-sphere, without necessarily meeting face to face very often. Facebook simply makes it possible to establish contact more often and expand the size of the friends-sphere considerably.

So as we often see when it comes to technology: there is absolutely nothing new about it – it just makes us able to do things that we have always done in new ways.