Like

Verb and noun, both are words now shadowed by Facebook. The most liked retailers on Facebook to date are Starbucks and Walmart with 36m and 34m Likes/fans respectively. Walmart uses the Like facility to sign up customers for rollback alerts on various products.

The Like and Share buttons are viewed over 22bn times daily across more than 7.5m websites.

Profile

Above is a Facebook profile in 2005. By the way, Facebook guy in the top left is actually Al Pacino.

Though we’re familiar with profiles on many social networks now, Facebook was the pioneer. 

Ok, there was MySpace, but generally you’d ask someone to check out your MySpace page, not your ‘profile’.

News

As in News Feed. As Facebook and later Twitter started to change how people found out about news items on the web, so did the definition of ‘news’ change.

News was suddenly what our friends were up to and what they were sharing.

Facebook coined the term ‘News Feed’ in 2006 but it was continually tinkered with. In 2011 options were added to allow filtering of who would appear in it, everyone or just recent interactions.

This year the feed was changed again, making organic reach harder to gain for brands.

Privacy

Ok, the web as a whole has redefined privacy , but Facebook has played a big part.

First there were many backlashes against Facebook when users felt the network was less than clear about who it would share photos with. New privacy settings in 2010 helped to clear this up, but the confusion is evident when you look at the editorial coverage at the time

More recently, Facebook was one of the internet giants affected by Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Only yesterday, it released data about National Security requests over the past year.

Facebook

Facebook itself is obviously now a proper noun, but also a verb, to describing browsing the site (that’s fallen out of usage a little over the past few years) or more often connecting with someone (“I’ll Facebook you!”). 

Heck, the word Facebook has been the most searched for on search engines for the past three years. 

Follow

Or following. It’s no longer sinister to literally and not figuratively follow your friends (in the Facebook sense).

Paper

Will this be the next word we think we knew? Check out Matt Owen’s post on the new Facebook publishing app called Paper, which will change how we access new content.

 

Post

Post is now more of an online, non-physical verb and noun than anything in the ‘real’ world. It’s not specific to Facebook, indeed the network likes ‘update’ but ‘post’ is also in common use.

More than 250bn photos have been posted on Facebook, with over 350m now posted daily.

Friend

Around 150bn friend connections have been made on Facebook. In the real world, the average number of social connections one person can handle is known as the Dunbar’s Number and is about 150.

This means, and I’m aware this maths isn’t exactly sound, friend connections in the real world could number 7bn multiplied by 150 (and then halved, as the connection is two way), which amounts to 525bn.

It’s fairly astounding to think that Facebook friend connections could be 30% the number of real-life connections after only 10 years of the platform.

Edgerank

Not so much a redefined word but two conflated. Edgerank is the algorithm that regulates sharing within Facebook. If you don’t know about it, check out Kelvin Newman’s helpful post