social networks

Can 600M People be Wrong About Facebook?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 9 Comments Tags: , ,

The Web is a funny creature. One day, you’re king of the world; the next you’re wondering where everyone went. Web users are fickle, willing to jump into the arms of another service in a heartbeat, and always looking for next shiny object.

Maybe it’s my eternal reservations about Facebook but I have a hunch there’s a chink Goliath’s armour. It may be small but Facebook’s dominance shouldn’t be taken for granted. The whispers start when hard-core social media users stars talking about how they rarely use Facebook because it’s “full of crap”. This comment was made by a PR executive who makes a living selling social media strategic and tactical services to clients.

Now you could dismiss this comment as simply a member of digital “elite” getting tired with his favourite toy. But another way to decipher this statement is it is an indication of a quiet movement starting to bubble up. One of the realities facing Facebook is the more mainstream it becomes, the less cool it becomes (assuming Facebook was ever cool!) As more companies and adults storm onto Facebook, its appeal among younger people diminishes.

At the same time, Facebook’s hunger to add more services (Places, e-mail, etc.) threatens to put it in “portal” territory -a place in which you can do everything without going anywhere else. (Anyone remember AOL?) It’s a compelling and potentially lucrative strategy but, at the same time, it is making Facebook a busier landscape with lots of bell, whistles and noise.

It is this cacophony that may start to drive people away from Facebook because every new service takes it farther away from its roots as a place for family and friends to share updates and photos. Maybe this explains why the person above lost his interest in Facebook.

Of course, millions of people continue to storm onto Facebook every week, and there are some people who believe Facebook will have one billion users by year-end. The thing about Facebook is it’s like a red-hot party – no matter crowded and uncomfortable, people keep on coming because it’s the place to be. But at some point, people may start to think there has to be another place with good music but room to move and hear yourself talk.

Facebook is far from reaching this juncture but it would be ill-advised to dismiss the concerns of people who are unhappy with the service. The only problem right now is there’s no other party happening with enough people to make it interesting. Until a legitimate rival to Facebook emerges, people leaving will be a dribble as opposed to a stampede.

More: If you’re looking for signs of Facebook’s growth, you can look no farther than its hunger for more office space.

The Party is Over; the Digital Pendulum is Swinging Back

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 No Comments Tags: , , , ,

The New York Times has an interesting article today looking at the launch of Path, a new social network founded by ex-Facebook employee Dave Morin, who describes it as a “personal network”.

The twist is Path lets you have a maximum of 50 friends, which means, theoretically, you are limited to having real friends within your network as opposed to friends of friends of friends, acquaintances and people you don’t know. At first blush, Path is definitely different. The question is whether 50 or fewer friends will have any kind of appeal in a world in which collecting friends seems paramount. As well, can Path establish a foothold in an already crowded market. (See my recent “New Kid on the Block” post about the challenges facing newcomers taking on giants.)

Another important question is whether Path is a novelty or whether the social network pendulum is starting to swing back after an enthusiastic couple of years that has seen Facebook explode. With Path and other social networks such as Diaspora, there appears to be a move towards smaller, more private networks that, frankly, operate more like real-world networks.

While Path is focused on small, Diaspora is focused on privacy. Both seem to be a direct backlash to Facebook, which is focused on large social graphs and making as much of your information public despite its ever-changing privacy control adjustments.

Personally, I have been waiting for the social pendulum to start swinging back, although to what extent is unclear.

Right now, it feels like a wild party in which anything goes. Everyone is building large social networks based more on numbers than people we know or value. We’re sharing astounding and alarming amounts of information about our personal and professional lives with little sense of the potential consequences, including the fact many people are surrendering any kind of privacy. And we’re engrossed within our digital worlds while other parts of our lives such as fitness and friends get less time and attention.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a digital animal as the next guy or girl. But there doesn’t seem to be a healthy balance between digital and non-digital. The Internet has come so far, so fast in the past decade, we have hardly had time to breath. At some point, I think people are going to run out of breath, look around, and wonder “How the hell did I get here?”

One way to look at start-ups such as Path is to consider them telltale signs or clues of what may be over the horizon for people looking for a new and different experience with the Web. For that matter, you could throw in the growing number of start-ups looking to wrestle e-mail to the ground given the amount of time we spend in our inboxes. And then there is the whole content curation movement.

All of these developments point to the fact people are starting to think the Web is out of control, and controlling too much of our lives and time.

The World Ignores “Quit Facebook Day”

By Mark Evans in Social Media 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

Did you know that May 31 was “Quit Facebook Day”? If you happened to miss it, you’re far from alone as QFD came and went quickly with only 36,000 people actually quitting Facebook.

The fact QFD flopped is not a surprise. With the Gulf of Mexico awash in oil from BP’s environmental disaster, there are far more important things to worry about than saying goodbye to Facebook.

While the people behind QFD probably had good intentions, their efforts were doomed to fail. While there are real concerns about Facebook’s ever-evolving privacy policies, people aren’t mad enough to walk away from Facebook.

The reality is despite Facebook’s strategic stumble, most people like using Facebook because it’s an easy way to keep in touch with friends and family.

Second, the vast majority of people have little or no concern about their privacy. In fact, most people have probably never looked at their privacy settings.

Third, there’s no viable alternatives if you decide to leave Facebook. What are you going to do, go to MySpace? That would be a crazy move.

Instead of leaving Facebook, most people look at it as an immature child. You love the child and, as a result, live with their dumb-ass moves because that’s just part of growing up. This is why QFD hardly caused a ripple.

More: For anyone interested in Facebook’s privacy setting, check out All Facebook’s 10 Things Every Facebook User Should Know.

As well, MarketWatch has a story on how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled today at the All Things D conference.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: “Sorry, My Bad”

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

Like anyone should be surprised but Facebook is sorry – really, really sorry – that it caused such a fuss by changing its privacy policies so dramatically recently.

But after “listening to recent concerns”, Facebook is “responding” with plans to add “privacy controls that are much simpler”, as well as making it easy to turn off all third-party services. And Facebook has published the “principles” under which it operates.

Zuckerberg cleared the air in an op-ed in the Washington Post. It’s a public “my bad”, which demonstrates that Facebook took notice of the critics raging against its plan to make pretty much everything public on Facebook.

And although Facebook is still the monster of social networks with more than 450 million users, it also had to acknowledge that there was growing interest and media coverage in other social networks such as Diadora and even Facebook.

But make no mistake: what Facebook has pulled off is a classic two steps forward, one step back move. In appearing as if it’s backing away from its new policies, Facebook is hoping to stave off the privacy critics. The reality, however, is Facebook’s still making more of your information public as it attempts to generate more revenue and traffic.

It is also important to remember that Facebook isn’t backing away from its new public approach at all. Instead, it’s making it less confusing to change your privacy settings if, in fact, you go to the trouble of changing them. The sad reality is many people aren’t that concerned about their privacy on Facebook even though they should be.

For more, check out the wave of coverage on Techmeme, including this story in The Atlantic.

Looking for the Next Facebook

By Mark Evans in Social Media 10 Comments Tags: , , ,

Legend has it that Bill Gates used to say the biggest threat to Microsoft was a developer working away in his basement – a premonition that was realized with two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google.

It’s a lesson that Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg should take to heart even as Facebook surges towards 500 million users. While not to suggest Facebook is going to disappear any time soon, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Facebook is losing its youthful innocence, and that a small, but growing, number of people are beginning to explore alternatives.

Truth be told, Facebook has been getting into trouble for the past couple of years with things such as Beacon, a steady series of puzzling interface changes, security leaks, constant changes in its privacy policies and, most recently, a new Graph API that pretty much throws privacy out the window.

This has set the stage for new social networks to emerge. Buoyed by the growing popularity of social networks and mounting concerns about Facebook’s Goliath-like behaviour, there appears to be a window of opportunity for new players with different approaches. A good example is Diaspora*, which the New York Times wrote about today.

Diaspora is being developed as an anti-Facebook by letting “users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share”. At a time when more people seem to be getting more cognizant of what’s said on the Web stays on the Web, Diaspora could represent a social network that is, ironically, anti-social.

My sense is Diaspora is just the first of many new kinds of social networks that will lure people away from Facebook or keep people from joining Facebook at all. We are already seeing new kinds of players such as Blippy and Swipely (which just raised $7.5 million in venture capital), although I’m puzzled by the appeal of consumers broadcasting their purchases. In the near future, expect to see more social networks launched with financial support from Silicon Valley VCs looking for the next Facebook.

I see the social networking market evolving like the browser market. MySpace is Netscape, and Facebook is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer killed Netscape – much like Facebook killed MySpace. In the browser market, however, the death of Netscape led to the birth of Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, et al. And while IE still leads the browser market, it’s no longer the dominant or most interesting player.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...