Is Facebook really innovative?

Fast Company has just named Facebook as it’s “Most Innovative Company of 2010.” When I initially got the magazine out of my mailbox and looked over the cover I was rather surprised to see this. Do most people consider Marck Zuckerberg and Facebook as innovative? I surely don’t.

I should say that this isn’t a bash post on Zuckerberg or Facebook.  I love Facebook and feel it is a great service and use it more times in a day then I care to point out.  And sure I have my opinions on Zuckerberg but at the same time he’s proven himself right more often then not and that deserves some credit.

What I am talking about is true innovation.  And I would have to say I could never consider Facebook innovative.  Everything they incorporate into the site has been done before, and often times it’s a blatant copy.  Look at their new news feed, that’s a rip of Twitter.  Hell even the concept of Facebook by-and-large is largely “borrowed” from other sites like Friendster and Myspace.  What they did was do it better.  It’s hardly innovative to watch the meteoric rise of Twitter and decide you want to incorporate the same idea into your product.

What’s innovative to me is to get my to use something on a daily basis in a way I haven’t before.  I have already said I quickly jumped onto the Facebook bandwagon and dumped Myspace without a second thought, but the point is I was largely doing the same things on Myspace, it was just better done over here at Facebook.   I am also by no means saying it’s a bad way to do business, adapt to survive is rarely wrong.  But lets not just slap them on a cover and tout them as innovators.  Savvy?  Maybe.  Able to perceive what the next big thing is?  Surely.  But I fall short of finding one truly innovative thing associated with Zuckerberg or Facebook.

Their rise is truly phenomenal but it’s hardly because of any new product of service that they cultivated.  Truth is looking back on history, the truly successful are often rarely the ones that innovate, it’s usually the ones that can adapt and circulate and in this case I think that holds very true.