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Jun 1, 2012    |       2 comments

Users, Facebook’s biggest asset and problem

Today I asked some friends about their social network usage after noticing how many unknown people would add me on Facebook and LinkedIn without any message explaining if we knew each other or why I should add them.

This made me realize how different Facebook has become in just a few years time. If it’s now a better or worse experience is probably very subjective and a matter for time to resolve.

I remember when Facebook was this awesome online place where everybody knew each other. People would share whatever they were up to, ask for people to join them around town, announce big personal news, organize parties, advise on weather, spy on their crushes etc. It was like high school, but online. Just awesome.

I unfortunately don’t see any of that anymore. Today, I see more and more people opening up their Facebook profile and experiences to the world. You can notice how different their usage is compared to people that got on Facebook early on.

People now use facebook as a personal (and often unfortunately commercial) marketing tool. They will share stuff they don’t even read just because it makes them look smart. They won’t share anymore pictures of them or their families and share updates on their lives with people they care about.

Dave Morin saw this way before anyone and decided to start Path, which was an extremely interesting idea. The problem is that I still get TONS of random people asking for approval on it.

In my very humble opinion, Facebook is failing at its vision.

I’m not saying that it sucks. I still love it more than any other internet product, but I’m getting scared about its future. Being open and connected with the world, sharing what you want others to see and engaging with random people is clearly a desire of many, myself included, and that’s why Twitter and Tumblr, as well as blogs, have succeeded so spectacularly. Facebook nailed the “closed groups of friends” experience early on and is now drifting away from it, nailing the new experience even better, but.. is this what it wants to become?

If I were considering buying $FB stock, the only question I would ask myself is: How will people use Facebook in 5 years?

A flier in a very private road might convert wildly better than a Billboard on a freeway. Facebook was awesome enough to be able to control every private road in the world and is now transforming all of those in massive freeways. This is a huge challenge for them, and an enormous opportunity for new startups to eat Facebook’s lunch.

  • http://www.facebook.com/chris.cinelli Chris Cinelli

    Regarding friendship I think that Facebook does already a great job to try to avoid you to add unknown people and pushing you on the stream the activity of who you cares the most. FB asks you to confirm if you really wants to add a person, when FB’s algorithms detect that that person may not be your real friend. If it bother you, there is an option on settings to prevent people to ask you to become their friends. If you chose to leave it on, you can still decide who to accept or not as friend. In the end is the user’s responsibility to choose who to connect as “friends”.

    I accept people that I like that I met in person at least once. Even if every now and then I can see somebody that I friended 4 years ago and do not ever remember when we met, I still get pretty “high quality content” on my stream. It shows me most of the times stories about people I care and high relevant tech/startup posts from both pages, groups and friends.

    Regardless how people use it, Facebook will still own their email and personal data. If a user spend 2 hours a day on it, you can push hyper-targeted articles/product/deals/etc on the pages they view. So monetization for them is not a problem. A lot of users are already using it just for playing games.The problem comes if people start diminishing the time they spend on FB. And I read a few articles saying that FB starts to become “uncool”.

  • http://twitter.com/Loremann Lorenzo Mannella

    Well, this is the key: is Facebook failing at its vision? I don’t think so. It’s just a matter of defining Facebook’s vision. Is it an awesome online place? Facebook’s 900+ million users all have different ideas on it. Personally, I look at it as a service I am paying for, because our personal data should be considered an e-currency. $FB stock is on the market and the company’s vision will shift dramatically from now on. So, if we like the Facebook as it was, why don’t we ask for more involvement as contributors? Is there any room for spontaneous collaboration between Facebook’s staff and us? Or is it just a marketing oriented social network? As you correctly stated, Facebook is a product. So, we can even choose not to buy it any more.