What do you think? Will facebook fall to the same fate that myspace has? Popular one day and then begin to decline as more and more people start using it less? Or will it continue to grow and be successful? What do you think?
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It’ll eventually go the same way Myspace went. They’re already making decisions that people don’t like and there’s a lot more problems now with Facebook.
I heard Google was designing a social networking site, so who knows. Maybe Google’s site will be the next big thing.
@TakingxOverxMe – Google has already tried social networking with orkut and they failed. Not to say they would fail again.
Either way I think my partner and I face a pretty big uphill battle with SocialMore.com when it launches later this summer. But I think we have some pretty interesting ideas.
I think Facebook is going down the tubes. It’s slowly turning into the internet ghetto that Myspace has become. Personally, I don’t think they should ever have allowed people without college adresses on that site.
Mm, probably not. FB has been continually improving, coming out with new features, and they’ve been pretty receptive to user feedback, as far as I can tell.
Myspace’s interface was cumbersome and not very user friendly at all, and they never bothered to change it. That’s the problem that they have. If not, then MySpace would probably still be a thriving niche for internet artists.
only if a better social networking site comes into the mix (twitter is obvi not good enough). facebook IS really starting to annoy me lately. so who knows.
I do not think it can hold its size, but I see a long future for it. It is next to useless as a media for getting to know people you do not already know. I think its strong suit and its weakness is that it is a great site for connecting or reconnecting with old friends, family, and coworkers. That can make it a poor site for for meeting new people or saying what is really on your mind. I think Facebook has peaked or is close to it. But I do not see it crashing
@crystal_air – I’m not sure if I agree about the college email addresses. But then I never went to college so I would have never become a member otherwise.
@bluehoursky – True. The problem with myspace that was it’s downfall was the same thing that made it popular for a while. The ability to do anything you wanted with your profile. Eventually that got too out of control and page load times took forever. Not to mention readability going down the tubes. I think because of that, facebook picked up a lot of fans.
That said, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about just how messy facebook has become with all the apps and everything else going on.
@StillNotaPrettyGirl – It’s definitely going to take something new to shake things up. But even something new could take years to catch on.
@trunthepaige – I agree on all points. The prevailing philosophy at facebook is that you only have one identify, your real self. Of which all aspects you share with all your friends. But not everyone is comfortable with that. We all have different sides that we show to different people. Facebook doesn’t make it easy to do that. You don’t want your co-workers or your family reading your sex blogs for instance, even if you’re comfortable with random stranger reading them.
On top of that, you’re right, facebook doesn’t make it easy to meet new people who are outside your circle of friends or people you have known in real life.
I’ve been reading the book “The Facebook Effect” and they say it multiple times. It was always and will always be intended to keep up with people you know or could know (friends of friends) in real life. If that’s the case, it doesn’t make much room for people random people who might have something interesting to share.
@roxics – Yeah, that too. I didn’t use Myspace for too long, and when I did, it was years ago, so my memory is pretty fuzzy.
The apps did get really really cluttered on Facebook, and I actually refused to visit some people’s profiles because their pages were chocked full of apps, and that made it impossible to navigate their page. But with the new tabbed features on Facebook, I think they’ve solved that problem pretty well. They’ve made the focus of the entire website the wall-to-wall sharing.
@bluehoursky – See it’s interesting you say that, because I and none of my friends ever post on each others walls. In fact I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they never even look at other peoples profiles. The only thing they do is read their own feed. The problem with all the apps is not that they are on the profiles, it’s that you constantly get updates in your feed about them.
@roxics – Oh, I do read my feed every time I go on, but I use FB as a way of communication a lot. I’d have to say that I look through pictures the most on FB, and their events function is REALLY useful.
I wish a horrible and painful demise for Facebook, and stand ready with a shovel in hand. However, I think I will be standing here for a long time. It’s okay, I’m a patient man.
It may fail eventually but not in the near future.
I think eventually the vast majority of people will grow tired with it and move on to the next big thing, whatever that may be. This social networking thing is kind of a fad. Studies show that most people who have facebook or twitter or a blog are really into it in the beginning and then kind of slack off after a period of time. Not all people, of course, but for a lot of people you have to think that they’re just going on facebook or whatever because it’s the “cool” thing to do.
As to the privacy issue that made people threaten to leave facebook recently, I have only this to say: Don’t say anything in your status update that you don’t want the whole universe to know. Don’t rag on your boss, don’t say negative things about your friends/lovers, don’t confess that you’re out partying on a day you called in sick. In other words, don’t be stupid.
I don’t know if it will grow much more than it has. It seems like almost everyone has a facebook or at least knows about it. So I don’t know how many people there are left out there to conquer. But I don’t see it failing any time in the near future.
@dirtbubble – Can you tell me what you don’t like about facebook so I can try to avoid it? :D
@leaflesstree – I agree with you about people going through phases with it.
“As to the privacy issue that made people
threaten to leave facebook recently, I have only this to say: Don’t say
anything in your status update that you don’t want the whole universe to
know. Don’t rag on your boss, don’t say negative things about your
friends/lovers, don’t confess that you’re out partying on a day you
called in sick. In other words, don’t be stupid. “
Generally this is true. All around good advice. But we’re making it easier to avoid these problems on our new network.
@roxics – I think the things I hate about it are precisely the things that makes it so successful. The lack of customization levels everyone off and allows the majority of users to feel comfortable with not having any “flair” to their page, but it also keeps the more expressive folks from being themselves. I suppose it’s a way to keep in touch with friends and family, but at that level it’s really no more than glorified BBS with some above-average chat capabilities. I can’t trust anything I post on Facebook. I took all my family photos down and threw up all the secuirty walls. It may have cost me a job interview or two, just because I wrote a little bit about my political and religious leanings. Basically my Facebook looks like everyone else’s except there’s nothing on it anymore because, obviously, “he’s a freak.”
I like MySpace. The only reason Facebook got more popular is because more people liked that no one could customize their pages. It’s not just that some users made crappy-looking MySpace pages, it’s that a lot of people were overwhlemed with options and felt like they couldn’t compete with the level of expression going on there. Now Facebook brings everyone back into the realm where only happy faces and popped collars, brags on cars and kids and well-groomed pets decide status.
Honestly, I don’t know how you can beat that angle.
@dirtbubble – ‘Honestly, I don’t know how you can beat that
angle.”
Our initial debut of the site won’t allow customization. But it will allow you to pick a color scheme for your profile. A few months after that though, we’re going to launch a feature that goes well beyond facebook and myspace when it comes to making it your own. Whether people embrace it or hate it is yet to be seen.
@roxics – What I think is you can expand customization just enough to let people feel different, but if you get into allowing freaky CSS/HTML codes and have people throwing modules this way and that with sparklies and blinkies and nasty-ass bg pics then you’ll be lost in MySpace (Xanga) land.
@dirtbubble – I agree. That stuff won’t be allowed, at least initially in the traditional sense. I can’t explain what will come without giving it away.
@roxics – I think it’s key what you said on your follow-up post about not trying to compete (directly, for now) with Facebook. There are a whole lot of smaller social networking sites targeting niche audiences with varying degrees of success (Xanga being one of those, I guess) with plenty of room for competition. Having a clear target market will be an important strategy.
@dirtbubble – Well, we’re not a niche site. We’re a general social network. So our audience is everyone. But we think that our feature set and the way things work will make people happy. We’ve spent months building and designing, logically figuring out the best way things will work. Come the end of summer/early fall when we launch the beta site, you’ll get to see it. But since we’re still building it, we’re still open to new suggestions.
@roxics – Sounds reasonably ambitious. I have about a hundred off-color jokes to follow that but I’ll leave you alone.