Karrine
Her-media.com

Think of Facebook as a great social “it” gimmick of right now for the masses.

In smaller isolated communities (Sudbury for example) there is definitely a greater emphasis (ingrained in the culture) on community chatter as well as the constant knowledge of what your neighbors and friends are up to (past, present and future) regardless if you have shared the information or via community gossip. This is how small communities operate.

Don’t get me wrong or take my opening statement in a negative way, but I grew up in a small community (158k) and by my 19 years of observations (from mainly a socio-technical point of view), smaller communities initially adopt a social addiction such as the new toy Facebook because they see it as a way to further tighten their relationships with others. Via Facebook’s clean and intuitive interface, it easily facilitates users to connect with old friends and exhibit their lives (photos, groups, networks, friends, notes, links etc.), thus furthering the operations of a small community.

For those that have heard of MySpace and passed on signing up because of the ‘mickey-mouse-ness’ stigma associated with it, Facebook appears to be the logical successor which has allowed more mainstream adoption.

A perfect example is how ICQ (IM technology) changed the landscape and paved the way for peer-2-peer which first rocked the social world (kinda) with Napster. I remember being one of the first hundred thousand ICQ users while in my first year of university (I miss early un-capped network speeds). ICQ blew up quickly due to college and university networks. It was the coolest and quickest means to communicate outside of email and by 2nd year university, if you had a computer, you had ICQ on it.

ICQ, like Myspace, was simply a first flavorful iteration of technology integrated social communities.

ICQ was adopted by early technology savvy college populations, then to the masses via MSN/Yahoo. Myspace, was adopted early on by less of a technology savvy and more of a community hungry population (high school to college).

Facebook is purely for anyone and everyone that has the internet and a willing to share and reconnect at will.

Looking at your example of Boston vs. San Francisco, as well as having spent time in both cities with my college friends, I accept and understand the current and wide adoption rate difference between the two. To sum it up on a very general level (via my observations), Boston is mainly driven by the college masses, which allows for a healthier adoption rate than sunny San Fran, where people have much better things to do than spend time in front of Facebook.

I don’t think smaller communities will be the ‘best prepared’ for a future that will be heavily based on social media and interactions, but I definitely see them better aligned to make use of and adopt it because of the nature of their small community. It’s all about the fit, and smaller communities are tighter by nature than urban folks that are more spread out and have less of that tight and frequent community interaction.

So far these statistics are extremely interesting and will be even more interesting in the next 6, 12 months. Future stats will reveal more to the story than we all have been hypothesizing about.

Cheers Scott