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Facebook: booming or decaying at the core?

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Maybe it’s the tenacious cold virus I’ve been battling with this week, but I’ve been feeling a bit downbeat about Facebook. While learned colleagues like Tom Nixon are optimistic about its potential as a platform, I’m just generally a bit cynical. One “hotmail friend” (lay person) described it to me as a nice address book and I can see what they mean.

Luckily Jeff Jarvis has enough enthusiasm for Facebook to keep everyone engaged. After a visit to a Facebook developer event with his son, Jarvis says:

There was, of course, a lot of discussion about monetization, with one skeptic in the crowd drawing everyone else’s justification and inspiration regarding revenue: the discussion turned into a human wiki. There’s advertising, of course, and direct-response and barter and loyalty points systems and virtual currencies and also research. Henderson said that at the food fight app, users started with $10 to buy rotten tomatoes but wanted more and so they offered food fight currency in exchange for answering market research questions. To date, he said, they’ve received 20 million responses: 80,000 users per day, 25 per user. That’s what excites them all: instant scale.

Meanwhile, at Unit Structures, Fred Stutzman is wondering if the core of Facebook users are withdrawing and, in doing so, taking some of the life out of the network as a whole…

As we look at the early adopters, and see how they are shuttering themselves to the outside world, one wonders what this means about the network as a whole. Networks are living things, and the early adopters make up Facebook’s core network. If these people are shuttering themselves from the storm of adoption and application spam, the network certainly still grows at the fringe, but it is dying in the middle. Granted, networks are resilient, but centrality is above-all, and the center of Facebook’s network is reacting.

It’s the fear of spam and usefulness debits in the whole experience that are the big danger for Facebook, perhaps.

Antony Mayfield

2 responses to “Facebook: booming or decaying at the core?”

  1. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    “the discussion turned into a human wiki”. That’s one of the things I seriously dislike when reading online – the tendency to try and use an internet tool as a descriptor for something illustrated far better by the original term. A Wiki is one tool by which a discussion can be held and a consensus reached – it is a facilitator, and using it as above comes across to me as trying to be painfully hip. I must be getting old ;).

    I’ve been pretty surprised that Facebook is so popular – the many invites I’ve received in my inbox made me think “Spam!” straight away. The positive comments I’ve come across surrounding its use came initially from the sense of security it provided vs MySpace, and then from its effectiveness as an old friends/family finder. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has raved to me about how great an apps platform it is – though I’m sure they’re out there :).

    One interesting discussion I had was with a German lady, around a month ago, who had never heard of Facebook, but when it was described to her said “Oh, X-Business”. Apparently there was a German site which tried to do the same as Facebook a while back, but positioned for business. They failed because people used in as a social site, not for business! I’ve not been able to find the site and verify any of this, though, but it makes a nice story.

    Ben

  2. darrell Avatar
    darrell

    personal feeling — based on no research — is that for ‘serious’ users, FB will settle down to being mostly a collaborative-filtering-based calendar/event recommendation engine (mostly because its a crying need and a really poorly-serviced need outside FB).

    the rest, including that, will get blown away by OpenID and its descendants in 24 months or so (which means probably 10 years, given how wildly my timescales are generally out)

    not putting money on any of that, mind

    d

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