what came before: we concluded that facebook's strong new feature is the friends list acquisition and management tool.

we re-examined the postion of elements within facebook. There are three aspects to "the view" within facebook.

1. One is the view of the user; completely internal to facebook, you can look into any users home page, or to post to the walls of your page or your friends, to tag content to other users, to request friendship, to respond to friendship requests, to add to your collections of images.

The commoddity is the attention of the user. The average user might spend 15 minutes per day (400+ minutes per month), times nearly a billion users, = 400 x 12 x 900,000,000 = 4.9 trillion (4,927,500,000,000) minutes per year of consumer attention.

That's a lot of time for the view inside of facebook's user content.

The key concept to the Facebook view is the concept of the stream, a revense chronological presentation of the latest first, and the oldest last. New post appear at the top of the page, and move downward as new material arrives. Thus, the "now" aspect of the stream assumes an perceptual centrality, and generates a sense that what is not current is swept further and further "downstream".

The stream becomes a limit that defeats attempts to organize information based on it's importance or priority. Only the newsest items are on top. It's a linear series of posts, each new one pushing the old ones down the page. This metaphor disrupts the ability to use a page to push a specific message, like an advertisement or product page. Commercial The use of the Facebook page for direct promotion, creating what seems like a commercial-free zone of personal relationships and shared content, a private space among comrades, a comfort zone without the distraction of ... (wait for it) "advertising."

There are some Facebook features that exist only on Facebook (your timeline, your virtual relationships), that are clearly Facebook property, and are not supported by a data export path. Facebook Terms of Service specify that the aggregate product of each users multiple postings -- the Timeline -- is Facebook proerty. So, each user's Timeline is Facebook's property, and can never (legally) leave.

Users experience a sense of ownership over their Timeline contents, and view it as their property. It does not rise to the level of a conflict with Facebook, and the metaphors that that are uncomfortable on Facebook (organization vectors other than Time, pages organized as advertising metaphores).

2. Another view is the view into Facebook from the outside. Facebook is used by advertisers and other commercial interests to gather information about users. This is accomplished by stimulating responses to users to controls on Facebook pages which can be used to indicate user preferences. Users may "friend" commercial pages as well as personal pages. User may visit pages of products or services, and may click on various buttons while on those pages. Additionally, users can encounter "like" and "share" opportunities on external services and web sites that can stimulate their Facebook accounts to accept relationships from pages for products and services (i.e. The Rolling Stones page).

User can also participate in direct questionnaires or surveys, indicating preferences for proposed new flavor for snack chips, for example, or cliking a "like" on a product page.

3. A third view of Facebook is the view to an individual user's content. The Facebook timeline view, as well as the gallery and contacts collections of individual users, constitute the value that binds the user to the services. After a period of participation on Facebook, a user will accumulate a considerable quantity of content on their wall, the "stream" of communications that passes through a user's page. The user's Timeline view -- the chronological presentation of a user's entire collection of posts -- becomes a significant historical portrayal of a portion of a user's life, and it contains multiple media objects embedded within it. Pictures, love notes, events, comments on current events, family history, notes from friends and relatives form a tight bond between the user and Facebook, one that is not easily broken. The curated content assumes an imporetance of its own, as it cannot be exported as such.

While galleries and contacts can be exported, the Timeline can only be viewed, or copied laboriously from computer screens.