The story about Facebook losing users has been whipping around for a couple days, and everybody’s all “Is this the end of Facebook?!?,” and what happens next?
This isn’t the end of Facebook. Not even close.
It’s tempting to treat Facebook as just the current incarnation of sites we’ve seen before: Friendster, MySpace, Geocities, Compuserve (which apparently still has a website!). They were huge, then they were gone, now they’re a joke. This will probably happen to Facebook sometime, but it won’t be soon, and this recent dip in their numbers is not the beginning of the end.
Facebook isn’t just another social website, it’s a platform. For better or worse, Facebook is increasingly tied into almost every major website, and not just with “like” buttons, but with login and authentication, commenting, ads, etc. And Facebook is a development platform, too, delivering their 700 million users to app and game developers, who are making lots of money. In other words, Facebook is becoming part of the infrastructure of the web, and it’s a significant economy. Things like that don’t dry up and blow away in a few years. Too many have invested too much.
So what’s with the dip in the numbers? Saturation. 150 million users in a country with about 300 million people (about 100 million of whom are under 14 or over 65) is, you know, almost everybody.
Well, that’s a bummer. I would do a happy dance if Facebook ate shit and died.
Yeah, too bad, I gather that Facebook is turning you people into narcissistic assholes.
Fuck Facebook.
As someone that has been working in social media since USENET, I respectfully disagree. The declining numbers for Facebook are looking more and more real. Even in the second half of 2010, you saw more months with traffic declines than increases and that is significantly more pronounced in the first half of 2011. It’s looking increasingly clear that 2010 was the peak for Facebook and this year will begin an inevitable decline.
In terms of the speed of this decline, I think you’re right. It will take a long time. People like to pretend that MySpace disappeared overnight but it still lingers as a major Web property in terms of traffic and it’s been more than three years since people were universally declaring it to be dead. I suspect Facebook will probably take closer to five years to be written off but this is the Internet and behaviors shift increasingly fast.
The real question with Facebook is “where is the utility?” If you take the user base away, you have an inferior microblogging platform (to Twitter), one of the worst photo sharing apps (compared to just about everyone), a weak messaging system (compared to any email/IM) and an increasing amount of spam and worthless promotional content. That doesn’t strike me as a recipe for longevity.
This probably isn’t the right forum for this debate but you hooked me with the “saturation” line.
Had FB after pressure from family. Killed it after getting tired of having to fiddle with privacy every other day to get around whatever new crap FB had thrown at us.
And seeing how vulnerable my own info was due to whatever apps/games/settings of the few people I had friended.
Too much trouble and very little benefit.