In 2000, Dave Gorman set out on a mission to prove that “loads” of people had the same name as him, by finding and meeting 54 other Dave Gormans (one for every card in the deck— including jokers.)

Just this morning, I quickly found a way to get in touch with 50 Dave Gormans, and also discovered that there are 352 people who share my own name and have registered on Facebook. His mission would clearly have been a lot faster with Facebook— although I doubt it would have made a great story. (Similarly, there’s no way that his Googlewhack adventure would be a success if he embarked on the same mission today.)

Having (somewhat arrogantly) dismissed MySpace as being barely (if at all) different from the “old school” of free websites like Angelfire and Geocities, and “social networking” being the domain of schoolchildren who have plenty of time on their hands and just want to compare how many friends they have, in the space of the last couple of weeks it seems like everyone I talk to is suddenly using Facebook. From registering a couple of weeks ago to see someone’s photos, then someone mentioning it in conversation the next day, to having new friends added on an almost daily basis. I know it’s not going to be long until I start getting worried that I haven’t checked my wall recently enough or something.

What seems to differentiate Facebook from the crowd (apart from a more refined design and avoiding mistakes made by other sites) is that it seems to be full of people I know. The odd thing is that the people I know who are on it all seem to be having similar experiences. Unless Doctor Who was involved in getting it started up, I don’t understand how this has happened. (It also raises the question of what you do with a social networking site without any users. How many startup sites are full of users who register, log in, log out and never return? How many people registered on Facebook 12 months ago and forgot all about it?)

Anyway, it’s the passing mentions of Facebook in the newspapers which are slightly more worrying to me. Of course, there are the predictable articles about social networking websites (such as where a 40 year old journalist registers on a Myspace, Facebook and Bebo, apparently just to show why he’s too old to “get it”) or articles about which celebrities are on what networks and who might add you to their friends list, but it’s the appearance of Facebook in news items that have nothing to do with Facebook itself that bothers me. For example, an article on the front page of the Sunday Times last weekend about the son of an MP who had been employed as an assistant on his father’s expenses (despite being a full time university student) was livened up by pictures of him partying with his rugby friends from his Facebook page. How easy will it be for amusing photos for your friends to end up being seen by someone preparing to interview you for a job? Are friends and relatives of high profile public figures going to need to be given a briefing on how to maintain a clean public e-profile? Would I be safer if I had a private profile under an assumed name for my friends to put any embarassing or incriminating pictures of me on? (Of course, that would basically mean inviting all my friends to pool all their embarassing and incriminating pictures of me together, which doesn’t sound like a great idea either…)

The statistics that Google make public about their searches only shows up to about February-March, but even then, searches for Facebook were rising exponentially. At a recent speech, Facebook announced that their membership is growing at a rate of 3% a week— that’s ~100,000 new users per day— with the fastest growing demographic being the over 25s. 50% of registered users come back to the site every day, and with 40 billion page views per month— an average of 50 pages per user per day— is getting more views than eBay.

It’s still growing in what can be done with it too. The developers platform has opened up, so anyone who knows about writing web applications can integrate their own websites with Facebook, giving it an enormous potential as an online marketplace or marketing tool. From a Fortune article;

No longer will Facebook consider itself merely another social network. Instead it is becoming a technology platform on which anyone can build applications for social computing.

Already, you can link in with Flickr to share your photos, Last.fm to share your music listening habits, and dozens of other sites— and the platform has only been online for a matter of days.

So what will happen next?

Well, my instinctive prediction is a cynical one of doom and gloom— that it will go out of fashion just as quickly as it became popular. Some sort of high profile event- say, something very nasty will happen to someone in a way that will make the headlines of the tabloid newspapers, which will then be followed by similar stories from other people, and “if only Facebook had listened when we emailled them to tell them what had happened, it all could have been stopped, but it’s all about the money now” (I have no doubt that it won’t be something that’s happened because of Facebook, but the site will somehow be involved in the story; someone will have used it to send nasty messages or pretended to be someone else or something they could as easily have done with an email/text message/postcard) and it will fill the headlines for a week or two. People will then get scared of their photos and friends networks being so open and cancel their accounts. A load of users will suddenly migrate to Bebo or MySpace or some other network, and a fraction of the people left behind will carry on poking each other and writing on their walls as normal. Or perhaps the lessons that some bloggers have learnt will be learnt all over again (such as “don’t tell someone you’re too ill to go out with them, then write on your blog about the fantastic party you went to instead”) and the initial rush of the potential that the web can offer you will be countered by the realisation of the potential it can offer other people.

That’s my instinctive predictions, anyway. Realistically, I think it’s gone past the point where any single event could have such a far-reaching impact on it. I think it can only get bigger from where it is now, and where it is now is probably best summed up as “huge, and growing fast.” The only obstacle I can confidently predict is that it’s own size will end up being a problem and they’ll be faced with information overload— too many people will put everyone they’ve ever met on their friends list, and find themselves with too many posts along the lines of “I’m thinking about last night’s television” or appearing on their news feed for them to keep up with them all, or to notice the important ones that will appear amongst the chatter. (Which funnily enough is pretty much the stage I’m at with my own email…)

There is always the possibility that a large corporation will buy them out, or advertising will increase to an unacceptable level, and users will start going on strike or boycotting the site in protest. The fact that Facebook has already turned down some very large offers from the likes of Yahoo makes me think that is very unlikely.

I believe that the future of the web lies in trust— who do you trust to give you the information you’re searching for, who do you trust with your credit card details, and who do you trust with your name and address? While Google are under heavy scrutiny for exactly what information they have about their users from it’s 2 year history of every single Google search they have made and what they plan to do with that information, millions of people are wilfully giving Facebook the kind of information that Google and countless other advertisers, salesmen and marketers would sell their grandmothers for, because they are only intending to share that information with friends and family who they trust— through Facebook. Which is likely to put them in a very interesting position on the web in the very near future.

Is it your home page yet?