I met up with one of my friends at Facebook yesterday and he told me he and the rest of the company had been celebrating Facebook hitting 100Million users all day. Zuckerberg took everyone out to a lawn in Palo Alto and gave a Jobsian “100M users isn’t just a company, its a movement” type of speech. Here’s an article with Dave Morin tweeting the news.
I post this because there are still some people in Higher Ed or K-12 that think Facebook is a fad, or that Facebook is for kids, or that students will jump ship as soon as adults get on. Facebook’s fastest growing segment in the US is those over 35. Some days they get .5 million new users a day. Facebook will be bigger than Myspace in about a month or two, and it is infinitely more scalable and usable. The site has engagement and retention rates that beats the absolute pants off of any other site on the web. Facebook is not going anywhere. Hands down.
Namaste.
IMHO the resistance to Facebook in higher ed is way down this year compared to last year or 2 years ago. I think it has duel causality:
1) Better understanding of the value
2) The older folks who tend to be more resistant are moving out and younger generations are moving in.
With the big baby boomer retirement undertow about to happen in education, I think we’ll see a big shift in higher ed culture toward accepting the newer tech tools.