But how often do you and your family make any meaningful use out of it? A pattern I've seen is that people join, have an active wall for a couple weeks and then they just go back to using sms and email for keeping in touch with each other.
I make a lot of use out of it - that being said, Facebook is a whole lot of fluff these days. Nothing they have done recently is really compelling from a user perspective, all of the really useful/interesting stuff was done ages ago:
- Writing on people's walls, was there from the start.
- Status updates, was there from the start.
- Event invitations, have been done forever.
- Using as an address book, has been like this from the start.
- Photos/tagging, has been around since forever.
What has Facebook added in the last couple of years that's really made the site more engrossing and compelling? Chat? Nobody uses that, almost. Applications? Most users I know see them as annoyances more than features. Gifts? That was a completely flop too.
The core use of Facebook has barely changed at all since it launched - there's a very small core set of features that make the site what it is... I'm convinced someone can come along and do these core features better.
