In reading Sebastien Provencher’s excellent post on Twitter becoming the “New Facebook” last week, there was one sentence cited from The Register that jumped out:
“On Facebook, behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.”
While Facebook is getting an increasingly amount of attention these days amid reports of Facebook Fatigue (as well as the Sarah Lacy-Zuckerberg SWSX “train wreck” interview) a more accurate assessment is Facebook is ust following a well-traveled path in which new services come out of nowhere to achieve tremendous buzz and attract lots of users. Then, the hype begins to fade, growth slows, and before you know it something shiny and new comes along that captures everyone’s attention.
Here’s just a few examples of markets (social networking and browsers) where this phenomena has happened:
Netscape is the perhaps the classic case of the once hot, then suddenly not Web “service”. Once the darling of online users, Netscape had lots of goodwill but still found itself abruptly pushed aside when Microsoft finally got serious about the Internet in 1998. Netscape’s share went from dominant to marginal to finally almost non-existent after AOL finally pulled the plug.
The social networking market is also fraught with now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t. Friendster, for example, was all the rage a few years ago to the point where it was being pursued by Google. In pretty short order, Friendster faded to the background (unless you lived in Brazil), while MySpace, Facebook and, now, Twitter moved on to the scene.
The challenge facing most online services is if you’re lucky/good enough to attract a lot of visitors, you can lose them as quickly. With few switching obstacles (and fewer with data portability emerging), online users are fickle, alarmingly disloyal and completely open to changing allegiances if given the opportunity.
It’s just a fact of life, which keeps online CEOs awake at night wondering whether tomorrow will be the day that the nice and exciting rival emerges from someone’s basement and on to the pages of TechCrunch.
A good example of how life in the fast lane is volatile and fickle look at the social network aggregation market where FriendFeed was the cat’s meow last week with many bloggers jumping hard on the bandwagon. Now, TechCrunch has opined that Socialthing! is even better and easier to use.
The number of companies able to rise above the fray is few and far between. Off the top of my head, this group includes Google, Amazon and eBay, which have stayed dominant despite intense competition. How they’ve been able to persevere despite being huge targets has much to do with services that work really well, great brands and a critical mass of users who clearly haven’t found a better or more viable alternative.
For the vast majority of other online services, fickleness rules the day. One day you’re on the top of the world; the next no one remembers your name.
Technorati Tags: Browsers, Search Engines, Social Networks
8 Comments
Well Mark I don’t think you have ever understood facebook. Since yourself and some older people “Got on” once it was open to the public you joined your cliches and that was it. The major difference is that every College student must have a facebook account to even be semi social in school. This generation of College students that use facebook, use it for their primary form of communication. People like you will use it since it is hot and then move on to something else.
Truth is, I’m feeling the same way about Facebook as you do Mark. The problem is that for me, the best part of Facebook was the status messages and the news feed. It is the only reason I continued to use Facebook (and the post links app). Now, Twitter comes along with fewer features but focusing on the only one I really like about Facebook. For me that’s a killer, it gives me what I like about Facebook but in a better way. So for me it isn’t that I jump to the next shinny thing, it’s that takes the FB experience to a new level.
BUT, as Mike posted, most Facebook users aren’t early adopters or tech guys. Early adopters are moving to Twitter (probably because of similar reasons as mine) and will eventually jump to Pownce if their new API continues to get traction and Twitter does nothing to fix their lack of support for payloads for example. Nevertheless, huge crowds of collage students still use Facebook and Europe is beginning to wake up to the Facebook revolution.
My two cents
Facebook fatigue = Facebook cynicism from the older crowd. Highscool and college students are not going to trade Facebook for Twitter or Linkedin anytime soon.
I was at the Playboy mansion in Novemeber for a party, what would you rather see? A status text line saying I’m at the PB mansion or the status line + the photos uploaded from my blackberry at the same time? Hmmmm…
It would be a shame if Facebook joined the digital cemetery. For me it is an incredibly useful place to interact with my community. The news feed is great to stay in touch, but it offers so much more like planning social events, learning about new products, and the mini blog aspect of the Notes feature. The benefit is really everything in one place. I can see the use of Twitter expanding but I don’t see the same depth of user experience as FB.
Although Facebook is perhaps losing users, it has introduced people to social media. Above all there has to be a compelling reason for people to use these services. New services like Fubar demonstrate that people are eager to connect, although not necessarily with the same people everyday.
Friendster is leading other social networking sites in Southeast Asia, not Brazil. That’s probably Orkut you’re talking about.
Facebook like those before it…myspace, friendster, geocities, etc…will lose its prominence and potentially die unless it continues to innovate and provide value to the consuming public. In essence, Facebook lacks a sustainable long term business model.
Youthful inexperience drives innovations like Facebook (because they have few filters to restrict their thinking) but maintaining that innovation lead is problematic. Comments from Mike and Magnus above are reflective of this youthful inexperience.
“Those that do not understand history are doomed to repeat it”
It is really easy to find the analogy in comparing facebook to geocities, friendster, etc…
To be fair though, none of these earlier renditions were able to come up with a product so polished. Don’t forget a little thing called evolution too, so don’t expect them to make the same mistakes those earlier social networks made.
To be equally fair, friendster is more polished than geocities, myspace is more polished than friendster, facebook is more polished than myspace, etc. The issue is not necessarily making mistakes…the issue is being on the leading edge of what consumers want. Building a sustainable business model protects one from the need to constantly innovate to keep the fickle consumer engaged. Facebook does not yet have it, unlike the eBays, Google, and Yahoos of the world. Without it, there will be a new shinny toy to come along that is “more polished than Facebook”…