say something

The Facebook Backlash, But Only Among Insignificant A-Listers and Geeks

Facebook, once more. The platform built by Mark Zuckerberg and his team is about the hit the main market, the Top 10 online, and faces a huge member turn over. The original target group, students, will soon graduate and probably refocus their time occupation and at the same time many new members have joined FB.
But there is one more reason for the expected change: the myspaceification of FB. A process which can’t be stopped anymore. A process responsible for both exodus and invasion. Exodus of students and geeks, the invasion by Joe and Jane Average.

Uglification

The introduction of F8 (Facebook applications platform) was the big breakthrough for non-students and myspace freaks to join FB. The huge plethora of useless time wasters such as Super Poke, FoodFight, Happy Hour and many more applications, turned FB within weeks from a much hyped platform in to the next MySpace. A MySpace with white background and thousands of multi-colored bitmaps on most profiles. Exactly what Joe and Jane love.

Fatigue

Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time. After having poked all your friends hundreds of times, there only are two options. Whether you have become the typical FB drone or you realize that what you are doing makes no sense at all.
Third possibility is that you have already been fired from your job because of all the working time you spent at FB.

Marketing

The implementation of sponsored platforms, multinational corporations using FB for marketing is nothing new. Many brands use Myspace or even LiveVideo.com for their marketing campaigns already. Facebook is nothing more than a new platform to those conglomerates.
For FB this opens the doors to the world wide internet user, the internet user who loves brands, labels and celebrities, but dislikes text-only sites. Commercial brainwashing.

Aggressive and Ugly Advertising

If FB/Microsoft manage it to keep the advertising, banner policy as is, the platform won’t suffer too much. The banners shown on FB are of acceptable visual quality. But who guarantees that application builders won’t soon build in fastmedia/clickmedia smiley and casino banners? Even application developers need to make money sooner or later.

Mix those four elements up and you have exactly what a websites needs to become really popular: a butt ugly looking flashing and blinking banner farm. Is it a surprise that 4 out of the 6 most popular websites according to Alexa are just as ugly time wasters: Yahoo, MSN, YouTube and Myspace (#1, #2,#4 and #6 accordig to Alexa.com).

The geeks and A-Listers, who prefer slick looking sites, will leave Facebook for exactly the same reason as they left Myspace for Facebook. Is the myspacecification of FB what Virb needs to finally go viral?

Related reading:

  • No related posts.

Published by Franky on August 1, 2007 in Being the Hype, Editorial, Social Networking • Did you like it? Subscribe! Or Submit it to Blogosphere News!

9 people says things!

  1. Can you give some examples of “Insignificant A-Listers and Geeks” leaving because of F8? Until now I’ve seen nothing but good things said about Facebook opening up their platform–even 37signals had good things to say.

    By Elliot Swan on August 1, 2007 7:11 pm

  2. I like where you were going there, but what I found from Facebook was what I found from MySpace: after a while the customizing became all you did. When you’re bored, instead of generating new content, or networking, you’re busy looking at the latest shiny bauble.

    For bloggers, this seems incredibly limiting, as they’re used to creating content, reading, listening and interacting. Add to that the countless friend requests the big names get, and you can easily see the paths to fatigue.

    Regardless, Facebook isn’t and wasn’t set up for old bloggers. It’s a way for young people to network. I doubt they will suffer from the A-lister loss.

    By John Stansbury on August 1, 2007 10:16 pm

  3. Elliot, so far I’m only aware of Calacanis leaving, but I can perfectly imagine that other A-Listers will leave because of the same reasons as Jason. I see a MyBlogLog similar situation.
    The platform is awesome, especially from a developer point of view, but now we have to wait how all the applications will look to monetize. And it’s time consuming for little return.

    John, I agree with you. I’ve already given up adding new apps. Bloggers and A-listers are only a small spot on FB’s radar. Growth will be independent of them.

    By Franky on August 2, 2007 1:25 am

  4. Facebooks privacy policy and terms of use is scary shit. I consider myself part of the original Facebook generation, when it was limited to the Higher Education level only and people were still waiting for their schools to get on there.

    I can’t say most of my friends have been happy with the expansions though. The apps create something new to do as people were getting bored, but now it’s starting to get cluttered and you get subscribed to notifications for no reason at all. Facebooks future will def be interesting to watch unfold.

    By Will on August 2, 2007 1:26 am

  5. What backlash?

    By Michael on August 3, 2007 12:52 am

  6. FB used to be beautiful, simple. The ads are more embedded, more pervasive and invasive now, and the number of apps that don’t even all work is creating a clutter that I agree is tipping more towards a myspace look. It’s nice that more people are there now except more users are starting to use cartoon or random avatars instead of actual faces, which makes finding people more of an obstacle.

    By Pearl on August 3, 2007 9:50 am

  7. [...] Wisdump wrote about it. Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of [...]

    By Happy Hotelier » Blog Archive » Facebook Fatigue, Fastpitch Networking the answer? on September 4, 2007 4:16 pm

  8. [...] The Facebook Backlash, But Only Among Insignificant A-Listers and Geeks Predicting the end of the early adopter interest in Facebook (tags: facebook facebook_backlash,) [...]

    By Web Community Forum » Blog Archive » links for 2007-09-11 on September 11, 2007 1:29 am

  9. [...] As college students and early adopters become more exasperated with all the high schoolers, old people and general MySpaceification of Facebook, Playboy is [...]

    By Web Community Forum » Blog Archive » Enabling the Social Company White Paper: Great Case Studies, Great Tips on September 11, 2007 8:00 pm

  10. Subscribe to comments via RSS!

    What do you think?