Facebook's secret: human findability

As you can see from the above picture that shows the Facebook's diffusion in December 2010, Facebook is the most used and widespread adopted social network in the world. The secret of Facebook is simple: applying a key concept of information architecture (namely findability) to people, thus turning every single user into a human resource that can be found and shared. Turning the human experience into a resource is simply a revolutionary approach to the IT world. Every single bit of an human life has been reformulated in terms of resources, which is different from assets. In fact, an asset necessarily implies a job, a career, a working position, whereas resource is a broader concept that ranges over a great variety of possible contexts, from daily life to emotional life and so on, thus encompassing all possible aspects of a human life. Findability is another key aspect of this secret: surfing the web, in its essence, means simply looking for something. In the past, people used to surf the web to search for electronic resources (files, documents, images etc.). Now, Facebook offers the opportunity to search for other people, other human resources. This is something that cannot be overlooked if we want to understand the secret of Facebook's success.

Leave a Reply

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.