Poll: Facebook

Facebook, that ubiquitous social networking tool, has not been kind to Torontonian Roger Rai this month. A couple of weeks ago, after dining at high-end Kultura, Rai went for a few drinks at trendy Lobby. Yet when questioned by his girlfriend about the evening's activities, Rai said he had gone straight home after dinner.

"But my girlfriend had seen photos of me on Facebook at Lobby," he explains. "I was so busted."

Busted, addicted and obsessed are three words that capture Toronto's relationship to the popular Internet site. As a city, we have more members than New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. Thirteen per cent of Torontonians have signed up.

We not only have more members than any other city – 670,038 as of this week– we have more groups within the site talking about the goings on of our town.

There are forums devoted to Toronto's island airport. Others have formed to chat about last weekend's Pride festivities, or how Toronto comedy is faring. In total, there are more than 350 groups of people dedicated to discussing different aspects of the TTC – whether it's okay to eat on it, how to do gymnastics in subways and whether tickets are overpriced. There are so many groups devoted to the minutia of Toronto that the magazine Spacing recently launched an online forum called Facebook Fridays, which highlights and reviews the best pages to visit.

"There are so many groups that we wanted to tell people which ones were worth checking into," says Matthew Blackett, publisher of Spacing. "Facebook has become a wonderful public forum – it's unbelievable."

But why is Toronto, more than any other place, so besotted with Facebook? It's hard to untangle, says Andy Walker, a technology writer, and author of The Absolute Beginners Guide to Security, Spam, Spyware and Viruses. A number of explanations stand out, he says.

One reason is that our city is technologically wired; Toronto has one of the highest penetrations of the Internet in the world. Another is our salaries, he adds. Torontonians have high disposable incomes compared with most other Canadians. We make almost 20 per cent more ($35,618) than the national average ($29,769).

With more money, we can afford broadband connection and the fast computers that make Facebook more enjoyable and easier to run.

"We tend to be early adopters of new technologies," explains Walker, who met his current girlfriend through Facebook, and says he's addicted to the site. "We are a city of gadget freaks and Internet geeks, so, of course, we are into Facebook."

Social class could also play a role, says Chris Thompson, a former Torontonian and technology writer who now lives in New York. Recent research from the United States suggests that people pick their social networking sites along class lines.

Facebook users are more likely to come from families that emphasize education and going to college, according to Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California. By contrast, Myspace members are more likely to come from poorer or working class backgrounds, Boyd found.

If social class plays a role, Facebook is the obvious choice for the city, says Thompson who writes for The New York Times magazine and other publications. Torontonians are more likely to be well educated than residents of most other North American cities, with higher numbers going to post-secondary education.

"Facebook started out focusing exclusively on the university population," he says. "Toronto is a huge university town, with four major universities and a number of smaller ones, so it makes sense that it would take off in the city."

Once numbers have reached a certain mass, the booming popularity can become a self-fulfilling phenomenon. This concept is known as the tipping point, and it refers to that critical moment when growth explodes.

It's a subject that comes up often – a number of on-line discussion boards have surfaced that talk about this phenomenon in Toronto. Jason McBride, co-editor of uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, and avid Facebook user, believes the site recently reached that critical mass.

A number of people who resisted the first Facebook wave are just joining now, he says. "The fact that everyone in Toronto is on encourages them to join. It's like with email or cell phones."

As an online roundtable for civic engagement, Facebook has no parallels, Blackett says. But the site serves the city in other ways, too. Last month, Crime Stoppers used the site to target people who might have information on the death of Jordan Manners.

After the 15-year-old was shot and killed in May, police wrote on several pages that had sprouted up in Jordan's memory, asking people to get in contact if they had any information about the murder. The Ontario Provincial Police have also used the site to check up on parties where there might be underage drinking or drugs. There are even reports of officers arriving at the scene of the crime with directions to the illegal party printed from the pages of Facebook.

"Once you figure out how it works, it can be quite an effective tool for reaching a lot of people really fast," says Constable Scott Mills, with the Crime Stoppers program.

The site is so popular that City of Toronto employees were banned from using it while at work last month. The ban was necessary, officials announced, to remove the temptation to waste "an inordinate amount of time".

For 36-year-old Rai, the surging popularity of the site has very real, immediate personal consequences. The animation producer says it is difficult to go out in the city without someone snapping a photo and posting it on their Facebook account.

A minor irritation perhaps, but the Facebook phenomenon has meant an unfortunate loss of privacy, he says.

"Someone will come up to me and ask, were you at the Drake on Tuesday, and I'll say; `How did you know?' It turns out they've seen me in a photo where I've been tagged. People end up knowing exactly what I'm up to whether I like it or not. It's a wonderful tool but it leaves you so exposed."

watta treash, he forgot to mention that renting in Toronto is 200 to 300% more expensive than other places in Canada