Facebook achieves ‘technological lock-in’ of its users
Facebook has reportedly become such a dominant force in the world of social networking sites, that many users stay loyal to it despite strong competition from popular websites such as MySpace and Twitter. 
A report by web marketing research company Comscore.com suggests that Facebook – which has over 100 million users in the US and 350 million globally – has achieved ‘technological lock-in’, or become integrated into the daily lives of many of its users.
The report has shown the website to achieve widespread dominance in the market due to the idea that the more it has been adopted by society the less likely users will be to change to another medium.
The concept of technological lock-in states that the more a society adopts a certain technology, the more unlikely users are to switch. Its the reason why the QWERTY keyboard layout, devised for typewriters in the 1870s, is still the standard despite more logical configurations being developed.
Comscore director Andrew Lipsman says about the cause of widespread user loyalty: “It’s something that feeds on itself… The more people who come into the network, the more connected they become to each other and there actually becomes a greater cost to leaving the network.”
UCLA student Alyssa Ravasio told Reuters: “I think Facebook is the most valuable Internet commodity in existence, more so than Google, because they are positioning themselves to be our online identity via Facebook connect… It’s your real name, it’s your real friends, and assuming they manage to navigate the privacy quagmire, they’re poised to become your universal login. I would almost argue that Facebook is the new mobile phone. It’s the new thing you need to keep in touch, almost a requirement of modern social life.”
One Cambridge University under-graduate said it is difficult to have a proper social life without Facebook as this is the way all student party invitations are sent out.
According to Comscore, Facebook had 112 million unique visitors in the US in December compared to the 57 million MySpace visitors and 20 million for Twitter. A technological lock-in is not guaranteed for Facebook though.
Facebook could lose visitors if it continues to anger its user base with sudden sweeping changes along the lines of the changes it recently made to its privacy settings. The changes were a way for Facebook to get more traffic in the build-up to monetize the site.