by Raymond L. Marr

Created on: November 24, 2009

How powerful is Facebook - to reconnect with lost friends or colleagues? As the top social site according to 2009 numbers, does such a behemoth of a company also insure that the interface is intuitive enough to also make it easy to find the people you seek? Certainly Facebook would like you to think so and I am inclined to agree.

As even when growth was happening there was constant improvements and enhancements, as they topped 10 million, then 20 million and so on, they begin to better organize the design of their website, when they were reaching 100 million they had a system that seemed quite effective at helping other people find lost friends and colleagues.

With the recent addition of Friendfeed to their repertoire they begin to implement some of it's better features into their own infrastructure, further extending the intuitiveness of their interface. While also bringing those people had known from Twitter by enabling you to use a recent improvement on Friendfeed that would connect all your twitter friends with your friendfeed by simply logging in with your twitter name on friendfeed. What Facebook had effectively done, is bring all the improved functionality of the recent redesign of FF to the Facebook World. Resulting in even more growth, and more connections, with more names to search bringing more of the world to the Facebook System.

With these additions they brought more people to Facebook, while indexing the names to be able to use their search function, as found on the top right of Facebook, which enabled even more profiles and names to be added and available. With all these augmentations, and so many names indexed the search function of Facebook became more effective. Though the other challenge became one which there were so many names that a person with a common name was a bit more difficult to find. To counter that effect of a company that had grown so substantially, there were other options added that enabled you to cross reference, names, locations, families, anything you remember about the person to narrow down your search. Through a system that seems to be effective enough at enabling you to find those you seek.

That of course was not the end, even since then there have been further tweaks to making searching more intuitive, to be able to reference external data such as your other email accounts, that would then check your contacts list for anyone who is already on Facebook.

The new media, the social site, constantly improved as a clear addition to a move towards more community based initiatives, to be able to connect with a world that never sleeps, to be able to get in touch with people you would of otherwise thought were lost. That is what Facebook is doing, and continues to improve. To reconnect with Colleagues, Relatives, or old friends has become much easier so take some time and experiment, try the functionality of Facebook and see if you feel like I do that the interface is more intuitive and is constantly getting better.

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