Facebook hype will fade

facebook growth went something like this:<p><pre><code> college --&#62; high school --&#62; young adults --&#62; everyone </code></pre> Trendy stuff generally follows the same cascade, more or less, where you don't see college students emulating the dress habits of the elderly.<p>facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and facebook withers, slowly starting to resemble an '85 buick.

"This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008."<p>Well said.<p>Sounds like a bubble to me.

"We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym."<p>I disagree with this, simply because grandma wasn't on any AOL chat rooms, but she _is_ on Facebook. The only reason I'm on FB is because Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob and grandma are also on there, and I can connect with them that way, and know what's happening in their lives in real time, instead of seeing them once a year at Christmas.<p>Grandma isn't going to sign up for IM or get a blog. She's on Facebook.<p>That's the difference between FB and everything else that came before it. The thing creates its own gravity field that attracts everyone, and as long as everyone I care about is on Facebook, so will I. Even though I really hate the thing.<p>That's the genius of FB, I think. Hate it or love it.

A bubble created around a legitimate service does not itself kill the service; the service becoming obsolete <i>does.</i><p>The author seems to completely miss this. AOL didn't die because it was bought by TW, it died because broadband became commonplace and people realized there was much more to the internet than AOL's walled garden. Myspace died because it was the last vestige of the "personal homepage" style internet and never ran with its burgeoning use as a network for musicians.<p>Facebook will fade when the next major gap in social connections+communication is filled. Simply saying "something more popular than Facebook will happen" seems a horribly obvious and empty statement. Now talking about what we still need or might discover with connections would prove insightful, but of course no one's going to blog about that until it's launched.

"...the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL's revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly."<p>So facebook will fail when people venture out and socialize in real life?<p>Seriously, though, I get the point generally, but I don't think it's quite the same. AOL and MySpace were assimilated and stifled by their parents' ways of doing things, whereas Facebook will likely continue to do things its own way. This is a company that is able to convince its investors that it knows best, and I don't think things will change with the Goldman investment.<p>I don't know if Facebook will be on top in 10 years, but I don't think this is the beginning of the end.

I don't understand the comparisons of FB to AOL, besides their seemingly common goal to sandbox the internet.<p>People who use AOL who discovered "the real" internet had no reason to go back. Everything they wanted was just as available + more. There's no friction to switching, beyond learning how to use a search engine.<p>Facebook has billions of photos, posts, comments, friend requests, updates, registrations through connect, all being added to the site every day. The longer someone uses it, the higher the cost to stop using it, or switch to another.<p>That's why FB has the staying power AOL did not.

I agree that popularity of social networks is faddish, and that Facebook will follow that rise and fall pattern, however...<p>I think that an open, distributed social networking protocol is a game changer. If there exists the ability to move between social networks while maintaining your social graph, that makes the way that social networks rise and fall very different than when sites hold your social graph hostage if you try to leave.

I don't necessarily agree the article but I'd be interested in hearing opinions on the interesting point the author presents near the end of the article: That social networking sites are like physical social spaces that will rise and fall in popularity.

Facebook needs to generate more revenue or if they go public, their stocks are going to tank like crazy after the speculation fades. Facebook's P/E ratio is out of proportion. Doesn't matter how many users Facebook have, if the company doesn't generate the proportional profits to match its valuation, then the company is going to go through some tough phases.<p>Many people are looking at the Facebook stocks like it's a Pablo Picasso painting, and with users twice as the population of United States, it's bound to be valuable. However, in the economy of supply and demand, the bubble will pop if it decides to go public. Unless Facebook can think new ways to earn more money.<p>But that's hard, because Facebook users hate changes. They aren't exactly Obama fans.

Facebook is definitely waning among my friends, but strong areas remains:<p>1. Social graph. Many are not active Facebook users but are keeping the accounts cos all their contacts are there. Facebook has actually helped people found their long loss friends and classmates.<p>2. Sharing links, picture and video. Facebook is replacing email as a means to share interesting contents. One friend actually visits Facebook just to read those contents posted by friends instead of going to the source such as YouTube. "It is easier". Twitter is an obvious alternative.<p>3. Facebook is the new Flickr.<p>4. Games. Hopefully when people think of FarmVille or CityVille they think of Zynga and not Facebook. Zynga should seriously break loose of this eco, build its own currency/credit system and focus on iOS/Android platforms.<p>5. All-in-one ness. Grandmas and aunties love this. Contacts, photos, video, links, cute apps are all-in-one. But this will mean less and less, as this group of not savvy web users will decrease with time.

It will take more than something "cool" to knock off Facebook - 600m users isn't fad-ish. A competitor has to have a MUCH better product and be very cool. It could happen, but Facebook is much more in the driver's seat than MySpace or Friendster ever were.

Best quote of the article, "Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."<p>They cost to run the site compared to how much they're making does not work. Their only hope is to run <i>really</i> fast and create a better advertising story. Otherwise, they need to get acquired by MS, Google or Apple and become an augment to a business that actually generates profit. Problem is their market cap is so huge that's becoming nearly impossible.

All social media sites these days are bound for backlash because of the sins of their fathers, Thats why its so hard to get a great idea to catch on, people are growing skeptical about social media's benefits in a sea of high priced commercial promotion.<p>People make sites like facebook popular, commercial entities buy in and then corner the initial value that these sites created. All of the marketing potential individual users had in the initial stages vanishes once commercial ads and user tracking appear, and once a value is placed on a site. Myspace still gets great hits, but mostly from spammers and bots, which makes it value worth less than the computers its hosted on. Its their own damn fault. Tom played the game right when he sold early I tell you.<p>These social media sites aren't doing anything substantial in order to help productivity nor promotion for individual users. They have features that encourage users to spam each other, which make their added peers end up blocking each other because of incessant tagging and messages to user inboxes that require tedious manual deletion, etc [all tactics to generate empty clicks]...<p>These social media sites all make the same mistakes in not emphasizing their talented users, and helping to build followings, while promoting businesses and services that are reliable and relevant to their own users. I'm a firm believer in a future of micro-social sites that focus on specific user communities rather than trying to warehouse everyone into a huge template. Facebook, as it is really doesn't provide much in terms of letting "like minds come together". There should be no reason why I can't communicate [through a social media buffer of course] with Jay Z about rapping, or Kanye about being a douchebag, or ask the real Ivanka Trump out on a date, and they all should be able to block me if they get pissed off in the process, thats what happens on Twitter, and thats why this year Twitter will capture a large percentage of Facebook's user shares, because its much more fulfilling than fake user profiles [for the moment]<p>American Idol has made a lot more people "famous" than Facebook, yet there are many more musicians and artists on Facebook, how is this possible? I see that as a problem. YouTube has been the only consistently unobtrusive and highly functional/useful social media tool that has survived. They do have user profiles, they host content, allow comments, sharing and communication, and do it all pretty much in an amazing and unobtrusive way. YouTube also allows its users to cross-share content on sites completely unrelated to itself, a major hosting expense, but really solid in terms of usefulness to site users, no idiotic "like" button required. Based on this, the concept of YouTube, perhaps, should be used as a key "roadmap" to social media success in the future.<p>Instead of working on promoting normal users you don't know, most social media sites are geared towards the "celebrity machine", for celebrities that are already popular. Promoting the same stuff that's on TV, and the radio, because someone paid for the ad space. Following this "celebrity machine" is a losing battle because it has to put on a new expensive outfit every time its launched, and it fails once people uncover its motives, or once innovation can't disguise it.<p>Facebook makes it appear to users that the only method to generate 5,000 followers requires landing a major record or movie deal, so much for being a talented musician. Programming and monetizing is only a tiny part of creating a successful social media site, this is why most get it wrong. If you want 4 years of profit, who cares, make the next big social media warehouse, if you want a lifetime of success, think carefully of the benefits your site can provide to the average joe, and make sure you keep that in your mantra for as long as your site lives. The motives have to be clear cut, highly functional, and it must offer fair and equal promotion for all of its users while limiting spamming and upholding privacy, otherwise it will stay the game of rise and downfall. There's a reason why YouTube has been a great site all of these years, it sticks to its user base and keeps them content.

I see so many people compare facebook to (late '90s) AOL these days. But the two never had much in common with each other. I think if facebook continues to bring out innovative ways/products/features that connect people with each other it will continue to be successful. Will it one day fade away? Probably. As do most huge dotcoms. But some even stay relevant for well over a decade (ebay, match, expedia, google). Most of them get a bit smaller and cruise along.

I have no real use for facebook anymore. Honestly, I think most people right now just go there for lack of something to procrastinate with. Twitter is much better for that anyway. Trying to get all my fb friends to jump ship with me. <a href="http://blog.ruedaminute.com/2011/01/dear-facebook-friends/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ruedaminute.com/2011/01/dear-facebook-friends/</a> Honestly, the more people on Twitter, the better for the internet IMHO.

Facebook has the advantage of being built into way more mobile devices than anything before it ever was. Many phones now come with a facebook icon on the main page when you first turn it on.<p>Also the amount of free advertising it gets from companies using it's logo everywhere with add us on facebook and have your say on facebook, how many other companies get their logo and a call to action to use there service for free on TV every day around the world?

There are at least a few important differences that the author ignored:<p>* Not many "trends" have had 500 million followers.<p>* The other companies mentioned actually ceded control in some fashion; Facebook is simply taking investment dollars.<p>* The other companies mentioned didn't have Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Only a crank wouldn't acknowledge that Zuckerberg's leadership has been masterful.

When you have so much traffic, it's easy to find other avenues for product changes. You can move into new niches. You gain flexibility.<p>But when you also have a high valuation, and have been taking money off the table, those choices become limited to those that are perceived as the highest growth. You lose flexibility.<p>Frugality is good, at all levels.

The thing which amazes me about Facebook is how perplexing the basic UI is and remains. My wife will tell me "hey someone has made a comment on your wall you HAVE to reply to it" and it will take me five minutes to figure out where this comment is buried. Oh it's not under "status" it's under "profile". WTF?

related from 2007: "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook" <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArti...</a><p>It certainly hasn't, but can facebook be the first social network to somehow help people maintain their different personas and keep their social circles unentangled when appropriate? Over the summer I facebook updated something about hacking on my front porch, and my wife's aunt commented asking how I got sick. Stuff like that isn't creepy, it's just awkward, and keeps me coming back here and to friendfeed or to reddit or wherever the community feels right for having a discussion.

Agree, Just wonder if all these people were incredibly good at cashing in at the top or the overwhelming tidal wave of news stories about them cashing in is what caused their decline

Isn't it safe to just say that every technology fades with time? The only constant in our industry is that we will all become less relevant in time.

most of the complaints here could be solved by facebook implementing (better) disjoint friend networks. I would imagine they are working on this. I currently have draconian privacy in place to prevent most of my friends from seeing status updates. Once this becomes easier wont these issues go away?

Read his books, <i>Exit Strategy</i> and also <i>Ecstasy Club</i>, good scifi.

Stupid title. Doesn't hype always fade, by definition?

Hypes will fade. By definition.

TheFacebook hype died in Nov. 2007 when they introduced advertisement.

Some people will get a lot of money in shares. The difficult question is when to buy and when to sell. The hype will fade and shares will fall down very quickly but to win in this game you have to determine when it will happen. I don't know when, but I think that the fall down will be the extraordinarily stiff, in one day or two a complete collapse. Wait and see.

Comparing Google with Facebook. I was using google since it was pretty unknown, I think it is still, after all these years, a good tool for searching. I will never use facebook, I think local solutions for meeting people will emerge soon and they will be much more appealing and useful.<p>Facebook only can exists if it can find a way to be a local tool.

in the future your time will fade

Facebook sucks!

I don't know how people can seriously believe facebook is a bunch of hype. Or even that it's at the top of its success, as this article claims.<p>The $50 billion valuation, yeah there's some hype there. But whether Facebook will one day surpass such an evaluation is I believe a strong reality.<p>I'm just amazed at how well-run a company Facebook is. I'm in awe of how it is in a constant state of evolution and constantly being tinkered with. Usually when companies get big you see them play the game more conservatively. Facebook is exciting because it doesn't do this. I see so much room for Facebook to grow and surpass my expectations for it, as it has time and time again.

I really think he doesn't know what he's talking about. Let's look at his qualifications. He's a professor of "Media Studies" at the New School. I think he's going to be taking everything with a lot of lit crit palavering.<p>Myspace to Facebook is a shallow analogy. If we would like to make an analogy with that analogy it would be like comparing Yahoo and Google. Facebook has far exceeded the market penetration of MySpace. Facebook has one of the best engineering teams around while MySpace attempted to some sort of media company (failing miserably at that). Facebook has a fairly credible revenue stream while we are never sure if MySpace every developed that.