David Adewumi

1. Photo Tagging

This has been the biggest, as well as the most controversial, feature Facebook offers its users. Some have lost jobs opportunities, others have broken up, while others have just faced public embarassment — and even caused great hurt by their Facebook Photos.

Forget Flickr, Facebook Photos began a revolution where tagging your friends (and those tagged photos showing up on your profile) has an almost cult-like following.

Not many will admit it, but I know some who spend hours stalking looking at others photos.

2. Mutual Friends

There is almost no bigger surprise then when you look at somebody else’s profile and say “I didn’t know HE was friends with HER!” NOt that being a friend really means they’re friends in First Life, but it’s still pretty interesting to SEE the degrees of separation.

One of the best things FAcebook offers in terms of managing your social graph.

3. Mini-feed and News feed

Again, a very controversial topic, the Mini-feed, which came first, just gives you a personal run down of what a particular person has been up to.

Looking at my mini-feed I’ve changed my status twice as well as posted two links in the past few days. Without mini-feed Twitter does not exist.

Newsfeed as revolutionary, giving you a home gossip page, running mini-feeds from your social graph on your Facebook Starting page.

One of the biggies is “added” so and so as a friend, and making or breaking relationships.

I have some friends tell me, “if it’s not on Facebook, it’s not official” in regards to relationships.

4. Relationship Status

While it’s on a plethora of other sites, both those that have come before and after Facebook, the validity of Facebook (i.e. most have profiles under real names, as opposed to absurd monikers a la AIM or MySpace) has increased the importance of the ever-present relationship status.

5. Legitimacy

As I mentioned in the above bullet, knowing that David ADewumi is really me, not yalo1 (my AIM profile) or some other moniker I’ve come up with for email, is so advantageous.

It means that when I meet someone, I can search for them on Facebook and I”ll probably find them. Obviously the more users who sign up, the better chance you have of finding someone, and your First Life social graph gets transferred increasingly online — as well as the possibility for creating relationships where there were none.

6. Simple, yet elegant

I told my sister a year or so again, that Facebook would destroy MySpace. Not because of Zuck or the Fbook team, although I’m sure they’re pretty impressive, but because I for one hvae always hated the clutter of MySpace.

MySpace, more or less, other than being a career-maker for artists, is AIM on steroids, while I consider Facebook to be Gmail on steroids. Simple, effective, easy to maneuver, and not a lot of extra garbage (before May 2007 that is, when they opened up the F8 platform).

I’ve read that it’s closely related to demographics: the preference among the educated, particularly white people prefer Facebook, while Latinos and Blacks prefer MySpace.

Case-in-point I met an old friend from high school, who is definitely a member of the lower-class in my mostly middle-class town. I hadn’t seen her in about 6 or 7 years and so I looked her up on Facebook after our brief encounter.

Couldn’t find her.

So, with the thought that she’d probably be on MySpace ( Hey, I wanted to test the socio-economic theory) I found her there, with a pretty active profile.

Go figure.

7. Javascript

Another distinguishable feature on Facebook, is the ease and speed you can open and close forms. This is the information, and the speed as well as the ability to find information is huge, and I can quickly scroll through a friend’s profile and open/close forms to find out the info/ wall, etc. that I am looking for.

I don’t remember exactly when they phased this in, but kudos to Facebook — another huge feature that most don’t consider, but very , very important to the simple design.

8. Message Threading

Facebook’s inbox, in my opinion, was the major influence on Gmail. Now Gmail’s user-interface is better and easier to navigate (it helps to have that powerful Google search in your inbox) the threading system was clearly employed first by Facebook.

It’s so easy to send messages, as well as group messages (just can’t stop them from continuing to show up in your inbox once your part of a conversation thread) that even my dad could do it.

Even Xobni has realized the power of threads in their Outlook Toolbar plugin.

9. Wall Posts

Probably the absolute biggest reason Facebook has gone global , is the ubiquitous wall posting system. Later improved with wall-wall, which is more proof of their superior message threading system.

Again, private messaging has gone public, and many-a-person has come up to me and relayed information they either gleaned from my wall, or another’s wall.

In fact, I often hear the comment “I confirmed it on Facebook,” while somebody’s gossiping about a third-person they never talk to, neither in 1st life nor the 2nd.

10. Groups

Although I’m not personally a big fan of these, Facebook groups are so “important” that main stream media journalists are often citing the groups as proof of a point of view (e.g. “the facebook group supporting Barack Obama now has x millions of members”).

You know you have arrived on the scene, when the same reporters who are loathe to use Wikipedia as a source are now citing as Social Network’s group numbers, as concrete evidence to support a fact.

11. Networks

It’s the same reason why Craigslist is taking marketshare away form Ebay (who has a 25% stake in Craigslist thanks to a buy-out from a former employee): Users People, connect better in a community.

It’s great to have a yahoo or Gmail account, but you can’t find people in your regional/work/school network easily, if at all.

With Facebook, I meet a student at Penn State, or a member of the community, and the search for their name is indexing users by 1) people in my immediate network and 2) their proximity to my network if they’re not in it.

This saves so many headaches, as hunting down an old friend is very easy — throw up a HS or College network search, now employers and localels, and I’d say you’re 10x more likely to find them.

People were meant to interact in a community-setting, period.

And Facebook has done an incredible job of bringing that to the internet.

It may be a case of “right time, right place,” but I think these 11 features have really set Facebook apart from the crowd.