Facebook is known for its new and innovative ideas, but the bar that’s been showing up at the top of the popular sites page in the last few days for some users, asking if you’d like to make the site your home page, is the oldest trick in the book. Yahoo and AOL have been lobbying for homepage status with users for years. In fact, at the height of AOL’s AIM messenger’s popularity, it would automatically reset a users homepage to AOL when the program was updated.
So why is it so important to all of these sites to be the first thing you see when you open an internet browser? Most of the companies who lobby for homepage status are browsers pushing to become your portal to the web. However, for many, social networking sites are taking over some of the work of retrieving information, the primary role of search engines. With your entire social network on hand to help answer questions, Facebook may actually have what it takes to compete with Google as the first site that comes to mind when you need a new piece of information.
Of course, as anyone with a teenager in the house will tell you, many younger web users already think that Facebook is the only thing that matters on the internet. That impression will only be enforced by Facebook being the first thing they see when they go online.
