I have 215 draft posts unpublished on this blog. Some will be published in the future, most won’t. I’ve decided to publish a very old draft post though. I stumbled upon this the other day and thought it was interesting because it was from May 2008… it’s about the potential demise of facebook and i’m not sure what triggered it, but obviously i was getting pretty pissed off about some new features facebook introduced…
10/5/2008
Is Facebook going the way of Myspace with all the clutter it’s added over the past year or so? Possibly… it seems most social networks tend to try to do things differently just when we’re getting used to them.
I think we could / can all see this coming though at some stage.. bebo, myspace & facebook don’t have a specific target market… the mind of a 13 year old is a world apart from an 18 year old and there lies the problem imo. You cannot keep both happy as there is a big fat ‘do not cross the line’ barrier between kids and adults. That barrier may not be up now, but it will eventually raise itself…
What appeals to me, won’t appeal to a typical 13 year old and versa (in general) so it’s a case of who do we cater for – the guys who have the cash (adults) or the guys who have the viral power and time to use the site (kids)…
Bebo and Myspace tapped the kids right off the bat, Facebook didn’t (it used to be an ‘older’ network) but with all the crap added recently, they’ve gone down the same path and are quickly losing that adult core…
Back to present day
Back then Facebook was only a fraction of the size it is now, so it hadn’t peaked in popularity at all. With big competition now on the scene, there is talk of a Facebook wobble for the first time. I don’t think it will happen now and i don’t think Facebook should be as worried about Google+ as some people make out, but i do think Facebook’s user base will change dramatically once Google+ goes public.
I’ve said this already but i see Google+ as a collaboration network and a much more formal version of Facebook where users have much more control over who sees what. No matter what happens, these changes are all good for us as social media lovers 🙂