Re: What Is The Point of Facebook ?
It could be replaced with email, but "easily"?
Not really. You're either having to maintain an email address book properly, with the relevant groups all setup and maintained (would you email ALL your contacts that you're off to LA, to stick with the prior example? Or do you have a list of LA residents? or people likely to be in LA?
Or you could stick one post on facebook, that all your friends see. They can either act on it or ignore it.
Facebook is a far more convenient tool to use and will actually reach the intended audience.
We are techies. Most people aren't.
Any idea how often my mum checks her email? No, me neither, but I can tell you she checks her facebook multiple times daily, and almost instantly should she be "tagged".
She will be closer to the average user than you or I, emailing her would be absolutely pointless unless you wanted a reply three weeks after you'd left LA, about something totally unrelated.
If you stopped 10k people in the street, and asked them when they last checked their email and when they last checked FB, you'd be surprised. It's much more of a standard across loads of the population than email is.