Not sure about you but the whole Facebook Fatigue story is tiring.
Any time there’s a smidgen of evidence that Facebook’s growth is poised to stall or slow, the Facebook Fatigue bandwagon gets rolling again.
Why? Well, I think almost everyone is waiting for Facebook to show signs of weakness because there’s nothing like reporting that the emperor has no clothes. Facebook’s rise has been so meteoric and seemingly so easy that everyone expects/wants the balloon to burst.
An undeniable factor in the Facebook Fatigue campaign is many of the people running with it are fatigued with Facebook – having been on it and written about it for months. Many of these people have already moved off Facebook, and moved on to something else – be it Twitter, Seesmic, podcasting, non-digital interaction with real people. Remember, however, these people are not the mainstream, which is still enthusiastically embracing Facebook as this most excellent tool.
Truth be told, Facebook probably has a few more years of solid user growth before everyone can go to town. At some point, the growth will become more modest, plateau or, heaven forbid, decline. But that won’t mean Facebook is cooked; it will just mean that Facebook has matured into MySpace, which has its fair share of ups and downs (see chart below) that no one writes about that much.
While the number of Facebook users is important, it’s not the most interesting story right now. The story to watch is Facebook’s evolution into a business and its effort to attract advertising to leverage is popularity.
The pressing questions include: Can Facebook’s management team execute at a time when the U.S. economy is poised to go into recession. Is Mark Zuckerberg the right person to lead this strategic charge? Will advertisers really embrace social networks as a platform to reach consumers?
Links: CNet has a story about trouble at Piczo, a social networking site focused on teenage girls. Another good read is a GigaOm post from last July looking at why people get Facebook Fatigue.
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I agree that user growth isn’t a problem for Facebook right now. The bigger issue will be advertisers spooked by the economy, combined with Facebook’s poorly performing ad inventory, combined with the surplus of online ad inventory that’s ahead of even the most robust projections of spending.
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