The popularity of Facebook has taken off in Toronto. The population of the “Toronto Network” on Facebook is close to 10% of the city’s registered population. This is amazing market penetration and its creating some interesting situations within the online community. For example, typically students and teachers maintain a certain professional distance. Facebook’s original strategy was to go after solely students and its penetration’s still seems to be higher in these younger demographics. Now that teachers are joining Facebook it puts them in immediate contact with their students. Problems have already started to develop with defamation on Facebook and many schools are setting up policies for how they will respond.

Facebook as a whole is not that dissimilar from the internet except that it allows people to connect more readily and provide a more accessible platform to communicate. Its brought together the concepts of blogging, email, digging or bookmarking content, and social groups. In the past it was difficult to find your friends web pages or blogs and teachers rarely interacted with them. Now they can easily encounter them through the Facebook network and there is much more publicity around inappropriate content. Facebook also creates a perception of privacy with its exclusive friend network and group settings but the full privacy settings are rarely used.

As a marketer its a great opportunity to interface with a variety of different age groups on a single platform. There are very few sites that have penetrated as deeply into the Toronto population across different age. It will be interesting to see if Facebook can maintain this position or they will fade away as different age groups seek specialized experiences. For example do students really want to be on the same platform as their teachers? Do co-workers want to be on the same platform as their drinking buddies? Some of these situations can be handled with the Facebook’s existing security model but many cannot. As Facebook increases user privacy it will risk slowing it growth.