Facebook: Witness to the Downturn

A Simple Fact

It’s hardly a bold prediction.  It’s not all that insightful, really.  But it is a certainty:  Facebook will fade away.  I’m not talking this year, or even next (if there is one), but some time well before the end of this decade.  It will happen much more quickly than many people would guess.  It won't go away.  AOL and MySpace still exist, though they're only shells of what they used to be and aspired to become.

The downturn of Facebook has already begun and I have witnessed it firsthand.  The explanation of how I know this is very simple.  If you want to save time, just skip over the meaningless filler material regarding what other people think and head straight to the How I Know section.

What Others Are Saying

For those of you who want to prolong the reveal, here are some samples of what some other people are writing.

Alex Cowles compares Facebook’s evolution to MySpace.  He liked the simple, clean style of Facebook in the early days, but that has fallen by the wayside.

“It's countless re-posts of that same picture of a goldfish farting, and thousands of "lol" related acronyms and suchlike. It's the knowledge that every time your "friends" even think about thinking about you, you’ll get a notification, a tag, a nudge, a gift, a message, an invite, a calendar event, a slap, a poke, a shove, a fight, a cavity search, an anal intrusion ad infinitum. It's the masses and their insatiable appetite for the lowest common denominator.”

Facebook is the new MySpace - The Demise of Facebook Has Begun

Douglas Rushkoff chronicles the rise and fall of several companies that skyrocketed to perceived success only to fall as quickly.  Among the debris, AOL and MySpace.

“The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the illusion that it is different, permanent, invincible and too big to fail. And to be sure, Facebook has gone about as far as any of them has at creating that illusion.”

“So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.”

Facebook hype will fade

Jason Huffman thinks that the noise level from people posting humorous pictures, news, and other random material waters down the reason why he started using Facebook in the first place and ultimately steers him to other communication tools such as Twitter.

“I guess what frustrates me most is that Facebook, an absolutely incredible social medium, is no longer about relationships.”

“As Facebook has turned the corner from being less about relationships and more about information, I believe the clock is ticking.  And this is no fault of Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook’s management group.  I think this is what we want as a culture.  People are wired to share things and post things that gratify the ego, which increases the capacity for humorous postings and unoriginal song lyrics that attain a bunch of "likes".”

The Demise of Facebook

Cadie Thompson reports on an interview with Eric Jackson in which Jackson gives his opinion on why Facebook will fade away.  Not disappear completely, mind you, but move off to a nice, rest home in much the same way that Yahoo has shuffled off.

"When you look over these three generations, no matter how successful you are in one generation, you don't seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how many smart PhDs you have working for you."

Facebook Will Disappear in 5 to 8 Years: Analyst

There are, of course, literally hundreds if not thousands of articles and blog posts that carry similar themes.  These were a few examples that illustrate some interesting points.


How I Know

Now that you’ve made it past the filler material of what other people think, I’ll tell you how I know for sure that Facebook will indeed fade away.  I'll tell you how I know the downturn has already begun.  It may not appear as a downturn in total number of users, or numbers of posts, or advertising dollars - at least not yet.  No, it's actually much worse than that.

You see, I have a teenage daughter.  She was glued to Facebook for the better part of the last two years.  And now… well… she’s “over it”.  Her Facebook use dropped dramatically.  She even quit cold turkey for seven weeks this spring.  I thought she’d make it a day or maybe a week, but she easily cruised through the entire self-imposed ban.  She still gets on it sometimes, but instead she’s moved on to other things.  

Instagram, now that’s cool (which is why Facebook was threatened enough to buy them for $1B).  Twitter trumps Facebook… at least until the next thing comes along.

Many of her friends feel the same way about Facebook.  Here are a couple sample tweets to illustrate:

They are the future.  They will shape what the next big thing will be.  Sure, they will change their mind.  And change it again, and again, and again....

And Facebook?  Well, apparently that’s so 2011.