David Emery Online

Status

21 April 2008

As well as the rise of the ‘News Feed’, we’ve also gained another feature from Facebook that is slowly seeping into popular culture:

Status.

David is writing about status updates

Of course, most of you have just thrown your hands up in the air and gone “what are you talking about – we’ve had status updates for years in instant message clients!” and I’d agree with you – we (the freaks and geeks) have had this particular form of ambient social interactivity for years. However, while IM has a pretty high penetration rate outside the geek crowd in my experience ‘normal’ people don’t update their status on IM much more then to say they are having lunch or in a meeting – in fact, a quick glance at my buddy list (which is pretty geek orientated anyway) only shows one custom status message.

Of course, post IM and pre Facebook we got Twitter – a whole online community built around the concept of ‘what are you doing?’. There is no doubt that Twitter brought the concept of status to a much larger audience, but its time has already come and gone, I think; the general population thinks it has no interest in telling people what they’re doing – the concept of publicly (and Twitter is very much orientated at “public”) broadcasting is something that – in the UK at least – most people have a problem with.

Of course, the truth is that most people love broadcasting their status to as many people as possible, but getting over that hurdle is quite difficult – whenever I’ve tried to get non-geeks using Twitter they almost unanimously can’t see what the point is.

This is where Facebook steps in.

By building up a platform with all sorts of uses, built on top of the connections you make with your friends, create a perfect platform for a status updating service. People are reticent to join something solely about status updating, but I’d wager that logging onto Facebook once everyday, browsing your news feed and then updating your status is pretty par for the course for most Facebook users. Everyone I’m friends with on Facebook has updated in the last week. It’s interesting, I think, the way people will participate and use something that, when explained to them in basic terms, they see little or no value in.