Facebook's "purpose"

I agree with a lot of Cathleen Falsani's piece on The Social Network, in which she praises Facebook's capacity for reconnecting real-world friends and reinforcing existing community. But she loses me when she suggests this is the site's purpose. I think it's difficult to define this, and I'm not sure how much it matters.

If you, like I, were a recent college grad in 2003--the last year of the pre-Facebook era--there's a fair chance you have a long-dormant Friendster account. Friendster was created specifically as a dating site, but a lot of people used it exclusively to crack each other up with silly comments and fake profiles of various nonhuman entities. The guy who built the site wasn't amused, but there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it.

Facebook's long since taken over Friendster's dominance (in the States, anyway), and I use it for all sorts of productive things I never imagined doing via Friendster: promoting blog posts, networking with colleagues, finding e-mail addresses and name spellings for people on my wedding invitation list. Of course, all these things were theoretically possible on Friendster, too--and none of them was intended by Facebook's creators. Social media's function has at least as much to do with organic trends among users as with technological capacity or official purpose. (The best illustration of this is Twitter.) I think Falsani overshoots here: