“One of the things you learn living in Silicon Valley your whole life is how fast things can change. Big companies can come and go in extremely short periods of time. Yahoo! was once what Google is today,” Ben Bajarin writes for TIME Magazine. “MySpace was once what Facebook is today. Innovation happens everywhere and waits for no company.”
“I recently polled almost 500 high school students in San Jose, and shockingly, not all of them were on Facebook,” Bajarin writes. “But perhaps not surprisingly, nearly all who were said they were basically bored with the site and had been using it significantly less.”
Bajarin writes, “Now, depending on how heavy of a technology user you are, you may find the idea of Facebook on its way out surprising or not surprising. For example, many of the young people I surveyed conveyed that they were ready for something else. Call me crazy, but I firmly believe that Facebook has either peaked or is on the cusp of peaking.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Short answer: Yes Facebook has peaked. Myself and my girlfriend have reduced the use of it to keeping in contact with friends who live out of town, instead of using email and getting reminders of friends birthdays etc. I used to be on Facebook everyday and now days or weeks can go by before I login. Same thing happened to every other fad that came before. If Facebook wants to stay relevant they should bring out their own mobile phone and leverage the messaging capabilities they have between the 100’s of millions of users.
Facebook missed a huge opportunity by not snatching up WebOS
+1
(But then Google, Apple, RIM and MS would have made it their mission to kill Facebook, instead of wooing them.)
MySpace gone because Facebook appeared and offered more effective ways of social communication.
Obviously, Google+ can not offer significant advantage over Facebook, and there is nothing else on the horizon. So while, of course, people come to their senses and start use Facebook less often, for now any parallels to MySpace are improper.
(Just in case, I would like to note that I do not have, nor ever had, serious activity in any social networks. I visit my only page just few times per year to check things like privacy settings.)
There’s no doubt in my mind. DCW.
It’s still the one-stop shop for event planning and status updates between friends. Google Plus promised much, but failed badly on implementation. Of the 25 or so friends who joined G+ when it was touted as “the next big thing,” only two have added any status updates in the last MONTH. Where’s the G+ events? Well, you have to use Google Calendar–it’s not properly integrated into G+ at all.
FB, for all its many warts, I still check almost every waking hour or two.
Yes. Facebook peaked years ago. Sure, the numbers have gone way up as far as numbers of people “on Facebook” (heck, even I am “on Facebook” but I used the site for about 5 minutes and never signed in again) but no one uses it for anything useful.
If you want to keep track of your old high school friends you would keep track of them without Facebook. The fact is, there’s a reason you don’t keep track of these people without Facebook: you just don’t care about them, stop feeling guilty about it.
Facebook will fail because Facebook has very little upside for its users and the potential bad stuff is enormous. You can lose your job, lose your real friends, ruin your marriage, not to mention waste thousands of hours of your limited time on earth stalking people through Facebook.
Facebook is such a colossal time-waster that we could probably fix the world economy overnight by shutting it down.
T.F.S.
Perhaps, but nothing else has come along to take it’s place. For people like me, who don’t live in their home town anymore, and have family scattered all over the world, there is no substitute. Google+ would be OK if Facebook was gone, but it’s not anywhere near as good as FB. That’s not to say FB doesn’t have it’s problems, but I think a lot of the haters don’t give proper credit to what this FREE service offers, and what an amazing thing they have created. Being able to keep up day to day with friends and loved ones thousands of miles away, even the minutiae, is priceless in my book.
True. I would drop FB completely in a heart-beat if I could.
But Google+ just isn’t a good enough replacement.
And I really wish something else would come along as I can’t stand FB.
Ad-supported is not the same thing as free. When it come to Google and Facebook, you pay for their services with your privacy.
I agree with the survey. I am see less frequent and less significant posts now than months ago from friends. My kids are just using the messaging part to communicate with friends now.
I am getting tired of all the commercial posts from companies so I go on less often too. I am starting to use twitter more for communicating with out of town friends.
I’m not on Facebook and will never be.
That said, I think Rob’s response was informative – he is using it less, but it still seem to be embedded in his life for a particular functionality. It seems to me that facebook has become the common way for people to keep in touch with out of town friends/family in addition to phone calls, etc. It may not be the only or best way, but it seems entrenched. Like texting, it has become a common method of communication that serves a particular function well. Could another social media site replace them in the future? Sure. Is it likely for the current group of facebook users to migrate themselves and all their contacts to, say, Google+? I suspect there is too much inertia for this to happen.
The next big social media thing is going to be along the lines of Find Friends on the iPhone: Something built into your smart phone, so that it’s always with you and you don’t have to wait for a site like FaceBook to grace us with an app that’s worth a darn.
Twitter is already dropping off. If you’re not a celebrity/sports figure or some media outlet trying to get people to follow you, most regular people don’t have much use for Twitter.
You know a social media is dying off when all the corporations start promoting their sites and asking you to follow or like them. That’s when it’s no longer cool.
Yeesh, I know. My bank has a “like us on Facebook” link on their website… I like my bank, but really?
In a word…..YES!
It may have peaked, but the plateau is vast.
Peaked?
It’s past peak, past plateau, and is in decline.
Numbers are growing in emerging markets but Facebook has been losing more users than it has gains in North American and Europe for at least a year.
If you want to keep track of far flung friends and family – it really is a useful tool (as has been noted above). I think that as it matures (and its audience matures) you will see it being used a lot more as a tool and less as a pastime or “game.”
It remains a very efficient way to broadcast status and informational items.
My guess is that it will continue to be a strong player, but people will change their use patterns.
I’m ready to start up “FacePalm” to replace Facebook! Anyone wanna join?
It would be in their interest to try to work with Apple to integrate its updating statuses and picture comments or updating pictures or even game scores from the game center using Facebook I think that could help. this weekend a few of my friends were playing temple run trying to out do one anothers scores but how we notified each other when one had a higher score than the other was take screenshots of our rankings in game center and then either through conversation posted to Facebook or send it as text message which was kind of annoying if there could’ve been a quicker way to do it would’ve been better. I noticed the game had a tweet option guess I can use that but didn’t wanna create something else and then have to get all my friends to follow one another on twitter.
Face it, Facebook is boring. So yesterday. And populated with those still desperately trying to get a life.
The people who use Facebook the most are egocentric losers who love the attention they believe they are getting… The men are looking to score in some vicarious manner…. The women, to be adored behind the safety of semi anonymity…. All in all a collosal waste of time…. Off you have over 80 friends you need to take a hard , long look at your real social life and skills
Yes. I know, I’m late to the party, but yes. I grow more annoyed with it and seeing it everywhere on everything. So your company has a Facebook page. So the flip what. Who cares? It is a “no-value added” waste of time.
Yes.
Was this article pulled by MDN? Censorship anyone?
Yep. While it’s still highly used, it’s past its prime. It is no longer cool. Now they people who are using it are soccer moms and a lot of companies who think they need to be on FB for some reason. Had an order with one of my suppliers who offered a 10% discount if we “liked” them on FB. So I liked them and they had to cough up $3000. I don’t think they thought it through. They just felt they had to be on FB to be relevant. They put $3000 in my pocket. Thank you very much.
Signed up because a game I liked suddenly required it. FB annoyed me so much I stopped playing the game and canceled my FB account.
Check out The Onion’s piece on Frienster…
“Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization”
http://www.theonion.com/video/internet-archaeologists-find-ruins-of-friendster-c,14389/
E en with the recent FTC agreement, I am still very fearful of Facebook, and analyses I have read point out that Facebook can still badly abuse some aspects of people’s privacy by items cut of of the deal with the FTC. This is why I am not on Facebook, and never will be.
Mark Zuckerberg fundamentally has no desire to respect privacy; he only wishes to exploit it. I hope that someday, his Teflon-coated world crashes and burns.
YES