No less than TIME magazine themselves asked whether Facebook is on a decline. While I understand it’s fashionable to ask whether products that are seemingly approaching the plateau of their product life cycle – are dying out, I do not think Facebook’s going anywhere.
And why? (I like to analyse questions like these from an emprical and this-is-how-we-work way rather than cull out numbers, graphs and stats that can be used to say anything)
1. It’s become our Flickr and Picasa: Apart from professional photographers and enthusiasts who benefit from pro features, I can’t recall too many people using either service anymore. Let me put it this way – you’re just back after a vacation. Or a friend’s birthday party. Or just transferring photos you’ve taken using your phone cam. What do you do with them? My guess is, Facebook and tag. And one doesn’t need stats to say how important photos are to the Facebook experience.
2. It’s too well entrenched in the ecosystem: Ecosystems will always survive. Or rather, killing them off is more difficult. Cases in point – Apple’s iPod-iTunes Store, Kindle-Kindle Store-third party sites (like Kindlefeeder). This is why these products will always have an edge over say, a Philips MP3 player or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. And really, it’s hard to picture a website that’s so well placed itself across the web as much as Facebook. From Like buttons on your favourite sports websites, to Fanboxes on your favourite brand page. Companies too, are rapidly reaching the point where the number of people on their Facebook page is akin to ‘mine’s bigger than yours’.
3. Facebook adapts: Some would say a little too well, with way too many changes made in the last year alone. But that’s a good sign – one of constant evolution. The news feed allows you to filter things out, and is increasingly delivering feeds of friends and pages you really interact with. Photo tagging has become stunningly easier. Design changes make Facebook so well integrated with your life. If there’s a trend happening on social media, I don’t think Zuck’s got a team of people who’re going to be clueless. If worldwide, people stop sharing links, then Facebook will change accordingly. Facebook’s shown that it’s not scared to kill off features that it feels are no longer required.
4. Facebook backs itself: Sure, it takes a lot of user feedback into consideration, we’re sure, but you’ve got to hand it to them – they back themselves. I see a lot of Steve Jobs’ old philosophies here – including the legendary “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what he wants.”
5. What, we’ve got to shift again?: No matter what happens in the online space, I cannot fathom us not having thousands of our photos online, a space to pimp our blogposts and a place to be connected (in a level at least one step above email) to our friends. If Facebook goes away, where do we do all this? I definitely do not envision ANOTHER social networking site (heck, we just got over hi5, Orkut and Myspace). Neither is Twitter going to steal FB’s audience. People are comfortable with Facebook, and I cannot see the network migration happening again. Not for a long, long time.
We’ve seen how loath people are to shifting to a new networking site, one even with the money and user data of Google. One popular cartoon shows how to post on social networking sites using a flowchart. One arrow, answering ‘No’ to ‘Do you want anyone to see the update?’ points to Google+.
Go ahead and post that update and water those plants. Facebook ain’t going anywhere.