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This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission?

In essence there were three strands to the Facebook Debate consisting of networking (with drinks and hot nibbles), panel presentations and debate/audience participation. Each of our panellists discussed what they thought of Facebook and social networks in general, their purpose and their evolution.

Professional Blogger Hugh MacLeod talked about networks being tied to social objects – such as a church with its congregation. BT’s J.P. Rangaswami discussed his belief that Facebook was fulfilling the need for a fourth enterprise media type (Search, Subscribe, Fulfilment and Conversation) and we had an insight into the corporate mind of BT – who apparently do not object at all to 6000 of its employees logging into Facebook during working hours.

Chad Wollen of AOL was due to talk about ‘Making money from Facebook’ but sadly didn’t (in my opinion)… he did stress his desire to see Facebook not follow in AOL’s footsteps by becoming almost a separate Internet (walled garden) of its own – and stressed that brands are incidental to us in our daily lives so advertisers would find it tough to engage, no tips on overcoming such hurdles though.

Indeed the monetary aspects were covered in most detail (albeit still quite briefly) by one Damien Mulley during a debate on ‘This House believes that Facebook’s decision to open up its interface to all developers was a mistake’. Damien suggested that there was a lot of money to be made from developing Facebook applications to add to the plethora of pointless apps already in existence at the expense of clients the world over with their greed and ambitions to get in on the ‘new bubble’. This was a slightly tongue in cheek ‘for the motion’ argument which Damien quite possibly may not have believed at all – but it was the most sensible idea I heard all evening for making money from Facebook – use cheap overseas labour to build things for corporates clutching at straws.

The rise of social networking tools such as Facebook has spurred many publishers to examine their business models to see if this is an area they can exploit, but there was a fair consensus among those I spoke with (and indeed some of the panellists) that people don’t want to belong to multiple vertical networks – just a generic one-size fits all application was best. Publishers would do better to develop groups and applications for the dominant player – Facebook… and encourage their readers to congregate there instead.

I’m not sure which of the evening’s presenters made the comment that ‘Blogging is very time consuming and of most use for ego boosting and not much else’ it could well of been Hugh Macleod again - I have to agree with him to a large degree. Time consuming it certainly is, there is little to reward a blogger apart from seeing readership and comments increase with the knowledge that they are the root cause. The evidence for this comment is probably reinforced by the article I wrote last year which demonstrated how many thousands of ‘reported blogs’ are actually only maintained for a few months.

The final quite humorous debate ‘The house believes that friend requests from your boss are best ignored’ was enjoyable (if a little uneducational). Sam Setih argued that Facebook had no room for bosses – indeed the clue is in the name BOS… ‘Bag Of Shit’ – which got some laughs. Robert Loch and Josie Fraser were arguing for bosses being allowed to see what we all got up to at the weekend, insisting that incriminating photographs wouldn’t affect their professional judgement. I liked Robert Loch’s summary ‘If you don’t want your boss on your friends list get a new boss’. I’ve also brushed over much of the joking around Facebook being the only place where you could actually ‘Poke’ or ‘Super Poke’ your boss.

I managed to catch a glimpse of an amusing Facebook imitator on one of the Internet screens available within the BT Centre. It was for ‘arse-book’ a place where you could theoretically meet all the people you really hate in the world - ‘Arsebook is an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE’ . This was quite topical after some earlier auditorium discussion had asked the question ‘Why do we all add old friends we’d rather not know any longer to our Facebook friends list?’.

Technorati Tags: BIMA, facebook, social networks, online advertising, web 2.0, hugh macleod, BT centre, AOL

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