Are Facebook’s days numbered?

by Lee Hopkins on May 12, 2010 · 4 comments

in clippings

facebook logo Oli Young from Melbourne seems to think so.

Oli’s compiled a list of blog posts from the last few weeks that whip the big blue logo-ed gorilla, especially over its ‘indeterminate and goal-post-moving’ privacy policy.

But if dissatisfaction with a supplier or service provider were enough to cause it to collapse, then many of us ‘old hands’ would have witnessed the collapse and death of Microsoft years ago, as we would have also witnessed the collapse of Apple, HP, the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, the Australian Stock Exchange, BP… the list is almost endless.

Human beings are intrinsically lazy, so asking them to shift from one platform where all their friends and behavioural memories are to another platform that is new and different is like asking the Pope to consider being inducted into your local Semitic group.

Facebook’s privacy issues were raised by many of us in its very early days, when we balked at handing over all the copyright of our content over; we did so anyway because we could see that Facebook would be big and if we were to be able to advise our clients professionally then we needed to be there too.

Nothing has changed in that regard; we still have a professional responsibility to our clients and ourselves that dictates we need to be involved with it in some capacity, regardless of the privacy issues.

And while Facebook continues to be the number one most visited site in  many parts of the western world, ahead of Google, then I can’t see the masses flocking to something else for a little while yet.

Sorry Oli, I see eye to eye with you on most things, but not this one.

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  • oliyoung

    Interesting points, and for the examples I agree. The monuments in the offline world you list are somewhat timeless, intrinsic in their value and you're unable to disconnect them from the services they supply, but that's the offline world.

    Online you're dealing with two new factors, a ridiculously low barrier to entry for new players and a somewhat lower cost of change. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo all suffered the same fates as I think are coming for Facebook, they were monuments online for brief periods, but all didn't see the disruptive new-comer around the corner offering better interaction, better search results, more addicitive interfaces, and they all burned out and are shells of their former beings.
    Online, eventually something better comes along, it's the nature of the beast; it is *so* easy to technologically build a better MySpace, someone will. Zuckerberg took that opportunity and rode it to an incredible high, however I think they are starting to make strategic errors that will cost them, and when it comes to privacy those mistakes will be fatal – you can't restore faith in your service when you start to make large scale blunders when it comes to people's personal data. Facebook narrowly, oh so narrowly, missed the bullet when they rolled out Beacon two years ago before seeing the folly in that exercise, I don't think they come back from this. The biggest question is what's next, and how you guys use that to tell your brand's messages and stories.

    We “Geeks” are the canaries in the coal mine for online services, we're the earliest of early adopters, but we're also the first to leave when we see issues on the horizon. No doubt Facebook still has a few years left in it, and if they're clever like MySpace with music, they'll find a niche and exploit it, but this is Facebook's high-water mark, it's all down-hill from here.

  • http://aqualung.typepad.com/aqualung/ aqualung

    And it's not about the privacy per se: Lee, Oli and I are all on Twitter, where pretty much everything we do is open to the world – but that's what we signed up for at the beginning. Facebook always sold itself to the neophyte web user as the “safe” place to network, where your personal data was safe and entirely under your own control. And now that it has a large slab of those non-geek, mainstream people baited, it now pulls the switch in the bait-and-switch and makes everything public by default – which is NOT what they signed up for, in fact it's the polar opposite! (Oli found a great graphic here demonstrating that erosion of privacy: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/)
    Now, the geeks/early adopters/canaries are starting to kick up about it, but paradoxically, we are the ones who will be least affected – because we look out for this stuff, and we are capable of adjusting our privacy settings to something approaching acceptable (plus we were under less of an illusion to start with :) ) – it's the people for whom Facebook is their only experience of the Web, who were conned into it by Facebook's promises, who are now being betrayed. And what for? So Zuckerberg can sell their “open graph” (talk about misleading advertising!) to advertisers

  • http://www.justanother24hours.com/ Daniel Young

    For every company that has come back from the abyss there are hundreds that have failed as a result of poor service, security, ethics. Facebook's advantage is that it is at the forefront of a new movement, where no rules currently apply. It is making the rules and consistently extending boundaries and crossing limits as it goes. 95 per cent of its users probably don't care or aren't thinking about privacy issues and won't until there is a significant issue that harms them or their interests.

  • Pingback: Is Facebook in trouble – part 2. No, it’s not.

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