With respect to Rod Drury, who I consider an extremely intelligent person, but he doesn’t get this social networking site. His post “Just say no to Facebook” suggests that because we are all busy people and don’t have time for our existing friends why would we want to join a website that is focused on meeting new people.

The latest research out of the US on reason for use of social networks is quite fascinating:

• 91% of respondents use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends they see.

• 72% of respondents use them to make plans with their friends.

Make new friends is way down the list of reasons.

When I was in the US last month a number of people said to me that their friends just didn’t respond to email or even text messaging. The only way they could stay in touch with them and make plans to meet was via MySpace or Facebook. When the first person told me this, I was astounded, then I started to think about my own email behaviour. I get up to 100 email messages per day almost all business related. I sometimes takes days to respond to a personal email. Facebook is a single interface where you can go and manage your social relationships quickly and efficiently. It’s CRM for your personal life! Facebook is the personal equivalent of Salesforce.com.

For me, most of my friends live in the UK and I’m there only every 3 months or so, and I find Facebook incredibly useful to stay in touch. I have to say that MySpace never really did it for me, but then I am fussy and have an aversion to websites that aren’t aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Rupert, you’re a gazzillionaire, get some decent designers to overhaul MySpace.

By the way, Facebook is growing at 4 times the rate of MySpace at the moment. I really hope News Corp didn’t buy the next Friendster.

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