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Teens In The UK Say Facebook Is Dead - Business Insider
This story has been carried in numerous news outlets over the past few days, most with more hype than this one.
The hype is a little premature: Facebook is not dead yet, though it is very interesting that it is no longer the network of choice amongst younger people, not only in the UK, and has not been for most of the past year. Though a billion or more users will take a while to leave, the ugliest company in social media will need to do something amazing really soon if it is to survive. If it does go under then it might happen surprisingly rapidly, thanks to the inverse of Metcalfe's Law, especially as Facebook is already suffocating under its own flab. It is the biggest we have ever seen but it is certainly not too big to die and, once the exodus gains momentum, could happen in months rather than years. Like MySpace, Hi5 and others that have fallen out of favour, it will likely collapse in a big way but won't totally vanish, especially given some sensible investments in things like Instagram that do make a lot of sense. Is this a bad thing? While mostly evil in its business practices, it has made some significant contributions to open source projects, but not enough to compensate for the harm it has done to the Internet in general: I won't be sorry to see it go. It doesn't need to be replaced. That's not how things work any more.
- Sets, nets and groups revisited
July 3, 2024 - 10:41pm
Jon Dron
Jon Dron
Comments
I'm not really surprised about this, Facebook has become so huge that I wouldn't be surprised about its quick and sudden death. I can also understand younger people not wanting to join the social network that their parents are on among other reasons.
Interesting point about the parents Evan - Facebook very deliberately created a single social network, not a lot of different overlapping ones as you would find in real life, because that was what would drive growth fastest. Although, under great pressure from its users, it finally adding a clunky overlay to partially address this in the form of lists, it is architecturally stuck with this model. Other systems, including the Landing and, perhaps more famously, Google+, very deliberately avoided doing that right at their core, through the use of circles. Parents can be in a different circle than friends, for example, making it a safe place where you don't have to see your parents being cool and they don't have to see you doing things they might not approve of, but you can still communicate about things that are relevant to both. Makes for much slower network growth but a more sustainable ecosystem in the long run, I think, which is more resilient to network effects because parts can die without the whole thing collapsing. Elgg, on which the Landing is built, got there several years before Google but, I have to reluctantly admit, Google+ makes the whole thing more intuitive and is mighty slick.