Facebook review

My Facebook review was also long overdue. I followed the enthusiasm of people using Facebook closely and tried to use it as a business tool myself in order to find out how helpful it could be in adding quality and ROI to my networking time.

Facebook gives you the opportunity to add more than just texts to your profile. You can add all sorts of little tools (applications) to your profile in order to make a better profile, get outside information or just to show rich material to your network on Facebook.
It has an easy interface, but adding the applications can sometimes be a bit difficult for inexperienced users. Nevertheless, it seems that Facebook has found a good way to unleash the social networking potential for business users. The search-engine is one of the best tagged-based engine I have seen so far. nevertheless it is still tagg based, limiting effective search potential and thus business potential. They seemed to have realized that themselve too so they did a good job geo-positioning the networking profile first and foremost.

One thing I found very disappointing: adding applications will only add a message to your profile within Facebook, it doesn't allow to communicate outside that closed environment like the tools on the Open Networkers do for instance. Simply put, you have to login, same as all the other sites, but that might be the only way to make it commercially feasible for them.


Summary
It's one of the best grown-up social business networking portals so far, but it can do a lot better adding syndication beyond Facebook to their strategy as well instead of just relying on the amount of people signed in.