Why I Like Facebook

I am in college, and I will admit to obsessing over Facebook just a little too much. I use Firefox (most of the time) to browse the internet, and one of my favorite ad-ons is PermaTabs. PermaTabs basically makes it so a tab will launch when Firefox starts and it is not possible to close the tab. I have three tabs that I always have open: Yahoo! Mail, Digg, and Facebook



All of that is really beside the point. Basically, Facebook is really high on my list of websites that I frequent. I even have wall posts, messages, pokes, and Cassie's status updates sent as text messages to my cell phone.

Personally, I am not a fan of MySpace. This mainly stems form the fact it does not qualify as a Web 2.0 site by my definition. Facebook on the other hand is constantly adding innovative features that keep pushing the social networking envelope. Sadly, these new features anger many members (probably those that like MySpace). Facebook's News Feed was probably the mosts famous of these features (as it made national news) but I now consider (and did when it was released) one of the more useful features the site has ever offered. The second place Facebook riot would probably be when they went public allowing anyone to register, but that was just a step in the sites evolution. Facebook still provides powerful tools to help guard ones privacy.

Finally, the actual reason I like Facebook is because I will one day become a software developer and Facebook seems to have many good practices going for them. Personally, I already have used PHP many times to program simple websites (although none are published). Facebook in their recent post on their blog talked PHP and Facebook. Basically, Facebook is one of the largest users of PHP and they are constantly developing to meet the demands of their large user base. Facebook users are probably some of the most loyal users with many of them visiting every day. (Citation Needed ;) Facebook constantly is contributing to these projects which they actually use in day to day operations.

Personally, I am very happy that companies such as Facebook are contributing back to the open source community that helped them get started. I predict that this cycle will only continue and the free software projects such as PHP will continue to thrive even in the face of competition from monetized alternatives.