My Ethnography on Facebook

Comment: one, two, three

My ethnography was on how people use facebook. The goal was to find the areas of facebook that are used the most, and those that are not used often. This information could then be used by the makers of facebook to know which areas of the site to focus on. The study followed 8 individuals and how often they used each of 10 features of facebook. Their use was followed back one month. 

I found through this ethnography that the 3 main features used are status updates, wall posts, and picture posting. The 3 least used features are application boxes, fan pages, and events. Using this knowledge, facebook can direct their attention towards those features. For the most used features, facebook should try to make them easier to use. An example is the picture posting. Earlier in facebook's existence, the uploading of pictures took a lot of time and effort. Now, it is extremely easy to upload a ton of photos. They could continue this by making tagging and other things quicker. For the least used features, they need to find out how to make them more accessible and noticable. I've noticed that facebook will create events and have notifications of these events on the side of the page. This appears to be a way to make events more popular. Even though observing only 8 people doesn't give enough data for proper conclusions, this can easily be expanded to get results that are a better representation of the entire facebook population.