» Rated & Retarded Shoreditch
economics, internet
End of the road for facebook?
It’s been reported this week that facebook, bebo (what?) and myspace are all getting hit up a lot less on the interweb recently. Traffic has dropped pretty significantly at all three and people are asking if this is the end of social networking. To which the answer is unequivocally no, failtards.
Social networking is not such a new thing; those of us who have been using the internet since before myspace might remember a site called faceparty; mainly populated by the grimy denizens of the rave and techno world, with a strong line in random hook-ups, faceparty is the Dolphin at 4am on monday morning compared to facebook’s Tea bar on a thursday night. And here’s the thing; faceparty is winning really hard as a social network still. It started well before 2000 and still pulls in very stable and strong traffic.
So what can facebook add to stop failing it, or at least keep getting traffic and selling ridiculously cheap advertising?
PROTIP: The answer is not the ‘What Kind of Lover Are You?’ Application
I predict that the next big step in social network is going to be a bit of ghettoization. For my real friends, I can still suffice with that most old school of social networks; e-mail. We want to be able to interrupt each other freely, and, to be honest, it’s really easy to opt out of a big CC email thread, so this works for me. In terms of workplace procrastination, I’ll lay good money on more time still being wasted in email banter between friends than on all the social networking sites combined. And then the ghetto social networks; I’ll be happy to shuffle many of my pseudo and low-level friends into where they are useful. Interesting observations on life? Get onto my twitter. Useful networking contact? Onto linkedin. And so on. And, in fact, putting the people who I do sports with into sports social network, my gig buddies in last.fm and yada yada…Each of these social networks then has the tools I need to do what I want with these people, and I can use facebook just as a bit of an aggregration (lets face it, it only really wins for photo tagging, yeah?)
Tags: internet
photo tagging, scrabulous, and figuring out how many tables you need to reserve for that birthday piss-up.
[...] kingmug wrote an interesting post today on End of the road for facebook?Here’s a quick excerptIt’s been reported this week that facebook, bebo (what?) and myspace are all getting hit up a lot less on the interweb recently. Traffic has dropped pretty significantly at all three and people are asking if this is the end of social … [...]