A lot of people are talking about Facebook and with good reason. The social networking site is getting traction with both business users and teenagers. When I recently asked a business colleague whether he was on LinkedIn, his reply was simple:

I don’t bother with LInkedIn because Facebook is the future.

I’m not on Facebook. I’ve been to the site a few times and I had to register before seeing anything. I’m sure this is an intentional feature and you can’t argue with success. I don’t explore it because I already spend too much time online and have a long list of other things I’m trying to finish.
If you do follow this space I would point you to a great post by Baris Karadogan on why Facebook may become a hugely valuable online property.

This argument reminds me of the principles in The Gorilla Game by Geoffrey Moore. He describes how Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco became gorillas as a result of leveraging 3 key forces:

1. The development of open, proprietary standards. This clearly holds true in the case of Facebook as Baris points out.
2. High switching costs. This may or may not be true for Facebook users. Clearly this was a great benefit for AOL in its early days since nobody wanted to give up their email address. To date, the social networking crowd has been those fickle users in the 15-25 year-old category; clearly this is changing.
3. Marketplace economies of scale through choosing a single, dominant platform. Given the lower cost of developing online software applications today, I think it is debatable whether this force will apply to Facebook.

I’ve given up trying to predict the future in the online space - or just about anywhere in life - but it seems hard to believe that Facebook cannot reach market dominance without leveraging similar forces.

In any case, don’t be surprised if I write about my experience on Facebook in a future blog post.