I think one of the best calculators out there is Care2's "Social Networking ROI Calculator": http://www.frogloop.com/social-network-calculator. It's a great way of thinking about what you really need to invest in these platforms to make them effective, rather than stale. EchoDitto also has a great matrix on what each of these technologies costs, so that you can calculate out what you'll *really* spend: http://www.echoditto.com/budgetmatrix. In fact, the ED folks have a great list of best practices, in general: http://www.echoditto.com/best.

In my experience a majority of the students that I know have access to and prefer Facebook, especially in comparison to MySpace. Furthermore, the usage of Facebook from what I have seen has span beyond students to faculty, staff and the global community – much in the same way that instant messaging services such as MSN are used in many parts of the world.

Facebook currently is making strides to become more accessible globally as it incorporates more languages – so far Spanish is an option although I have no idea of the site’s current direction in terms of adding more languages. Though this small step is making it easier for others to access the site and it appears to be catching on in Spain. During my stay there I encountered quite a few young people there that already had accounts with Facebook, although tools such as MSN Messenger were the norm.

The difficulty in choosing a social platform is balancing the functions that you can use on the social platform, accessibility, and how many users use that particular platform. To me, it appears that if you would like to hit a large population of students, staff, faculty, and people globally Facebook may be the way to go.

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For example, I was considering the process of Facebook as social networking. I took a sample of 10 people that I knew and averaged the amount of friends that they had. The score came out to be 372 [372.9 actually but we just will not count that ;)] Of course there may not be strong connections between the people they have listed as friends but nonetheless that is an average of 372 people that are connected.

Furthermore, Facebook has initiated a chat application which may add to the ease of passing information as it is a one on one, real time conversation versus leaving a message on a person’s “wall” or simply sending them a group invite link. Although, with all of that said there are so potential issues with the usage of Facebook that I have seen.

The first issue is the usage of groups in Facebook. Often times a user can find themselves bombarded with many group invites, be they purposeful or not. This bombardment often leads to an inflated group membership which means that some groups may simply never see the light of day again after having been added.

Also, depending on person there may be an issue of the relationship strength that they have with a particular “friend” on Facebook. There have been many cases in which two people connect, or better said, add each other as friends simply because they have seen each other on campus or merely noticed something about the person’s profile page. Therefore the ability to influence, or excite these “friends” about service could be difficult.

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I am not too familiar with the Change.org website to give much feedback on its usage personally and would look forward to hearing a bit about it from a committed user. From the looks of it, you may potentially find an audience that is already interested if not involved in service. But upon considering the usage of the website one would have to consider if they plan on hitting those people that are already interested in service, or bringing new people to the idea.

In conclusion, despite the lack of customization that Facebook may have, if one is looking to merge social life with service, Facebook would be the route to go.


What are others' insights?

A little update, Facebook now has the option of being read in German, Italian, French, perhaps Chinese and Japanese (I do not know enough of those language systems to be sure), and "Polski, Nederlands, Norsk" - although, I'm not sure how you say these particular langauges in English for sure. Either way, it demonstrates that Facebook is taking steps to allow access for a broader community than just English speakers.