“Facebook is my pick for the social networking site that will still be thriving in five years when MySpace and Bebo and Hi5 and all have succumbed.” – me, June 4, 2007*
You almost can’t surf the interwebz these days without coming across the Facebook backlash. It’s a deserved backlash – Facebook, seemingly under the direct guidance of its founder Mark Zuckerberg, has been playing fast and loose with the data of its users, and doing its best to keep users unaware of what it was up to.
So I have several friends who’ve quit Facebook entirely recently, and anti-Facebook links are enthusiastically circulated. (Including this great tool that scans your Facebook privacy settings for you.)
It kinda seems like the end of days for Facebook; or at the least, the beginning of the end. (Or maybe the middle of the end, with Twitter as the beginning of the end.)
But you know what? Facebook isn’t going anywhere. All of this activity I’m seeing, and you’re probably seeing too if you’re reading this, is just a storm in a teacup. Clamber out of the teacup and check out the rest of the table, and you’ll see it’s not stormy at all out there.
Here are the three reasons why Facebook is going to keep trucking on:
1. Sharing photos and holding events
Facebook *owns* the event-coordination space. You can manage invitations and details and everything right there in one spot, and then you can share the photos you took! For the past year, people not on Facebook will have noticed that they are starting to get forgotten – they’ll only hear about events afterwards, in passing. Facebook’s fighting it out with Flickr and Picasa for photo-sharing too, and my guess is it’s winning – Flickr and Picasa are where people who care about images go, but for people who just want to show pics of their friends to those same friends, why would you step outside Facebook’s door?
2. Farmville
Wiki says: “Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010. The total FarmVille users are over 20% of the users of Facebook and over 1% of the population of the world.”
The number of people who love to play Farmville is several orders of magnitude greater than all those who care about online privacy. These people are going nowhere.
3. Where do I log in? I can’t find where I log in.
If you never read about the “where do I log in?” meme, you really should. Find it here. Basic lesson: a significant chunk of internet users fundamentally don’t understand what they are doing online. These people want to log into Facebook. Arcane privacy concerns will not play to this audience at all.
So: Zuckerberg is right. Facebook can do what it wants to privacy settings and it will still triumph.
It makes me wonder, what would force change? I dunno about this. Three guesses, though:
* making it personal – if some aspect of this argument really gets to Zuckerberg himself, then he could lead a major change. I don’t know what it would take to reach the guy, though, he seems quite impervious to any outside agument.
* making it legal – get the U.S. govt involved (no other govt will do) and even the biggest internet website will have to play along. But how to raise that behemoth in a way that works to the good, and not the randomly destructive?
* stoking fear – the only thing that will get users off Facebook (apart from a competitor who can make a good show and stick around a long time to soak up users) is fear. People would ditch Facebook because of fear. These fears would have to be primal and probably irrational. I don’t know where they might come from. That would work.
So I guess I’m expecting Facebook to stick around, and to be honest I’m not too worried about that. I hope the backlash does make some major changes in how Facebook does what it does, but its fundamental service – photos and events – works well for me. I dip into the stream of chatter from my friends about once a week and that’s always quite fun. As far as I’m concerned, it can stay.
That said, I’m still waiting for the integration of Facebook social networking with mobile devices (iPhone et al.) Twitter has scored big with its comfortable fit on the mobile platform, but an integrated Facebook-as-cellphone-OS can’t be far away now, and once that (or its open-protocol relative) hits, there’s no going back – next stop, mirrorshades.
*I got it wrong – it only took two years for MySpace, Bebo and Hi5 to fall.