Why play Facebook?

As I could remember, Friendster was the top social website and Malaysians were recorded as the largest group of people using it (kira syok2 sendiri la ni).

And now that has changed. In Malaysia these days, another social website named Facebook rules the internet. Almost everybody especially the youngsters, would have a Facebook account and they will "poke" each other, post on the "walls", chit chatting using a built-in messenger, "tagging" pictures, playing "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" and obviously taking endless numbers of quizzes (and posting quiz results on the "wall", so that "other" people can see).

All of these extra feature made Facebook indispensable (you can't throw it away) to its users and also made its competitors popularity going way-way down.

But there's one feature that made me think. That feature is the NOTIFICATION thingy, for the benefit of non-Facebook users, it's a red-colored bubble at the bottom right of the window with the number of notifications in the middle of it.

The first thing a Facebook user would do as he/she opens the website is to click on this red bubble before anything else. And why is that?

To some effect, users will keep on thinking about this red bubbles even after they have closed the Facebook website. They will think about "who will be commenting on my post" or "Am I going to be tagged today?" and so on and so forth.

I think it shows that:
i. we are still humans, as human must have some sense of curiosity. That's why we click the red bubble before anything else.
ii. we are in need of feedbacks to survive mentally (that's why criminals are being sent to the prison, so that they can be "tortured mentally")

And I'm sure that there's a bit feeling of "keghairahan" as we click on the red bubble. And why is that? Which part of the brain cause us to feel that? Is that part of the brain made us curious for other things, such as the question on religion, history, biology, chemistry, physics, cookings, writings, football etc?

What a difference has a small, red, simply-made bubble made on our minds by playing on us psychologically by which the fact remains: Facebook is one of the most visited website in the world. The red bubble did it's job very very well.