Are we burning out on Facebook?
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Wow. What could have caused a decline like this? The end of the school year? The ongoing privacy brouhaha? Twitter?
As much as I'd like to imagine that Facebook is dying (it has truly horrific usability), I don't think it's going away any time soon.
Maybe everyone already has a FB account.
To be clear, I don't use fb, but I opened an account so that I can learn the api and make some page apps. The documentation is old, sporadic, a pain to find, and ...broken. Locating simple things like where my pages are seems to take me forever!! I just have a hard time finding anything on fb that doesn't have to do with status updates and "the wall".
Course I am hardly an "average user" and half a billion people seem to think its good, right? right?
Any thoughts on this?
As Facebook attempted to integrate itself into more of its users' lifestyles, though, its UI became unfit for the depth of social functionality it had to control.
Also, as Facebook's users become more familiar with its workings (social, not technical), it becomes quite apparent that there are limitations to having all relationships equal.
This is truly where Facebook fails. I have friends, I have a best friend, I have acquaintances (both business and social), and I have people I don't like, I may have some enemies, too.
But in the realm of Facebook, all these people are my friends, and I have no way to differentiate that within the Facebook platform. I do not believe it is the UI that is the problem, but the underlying architecture of it's "social functionality".
Then after I had shown her that she had about 100 tick boxes to un tick. That is just a recent example of usability problems, to be honest these problems only are apparent in uncommon uses of facebook and for the simple part (messages and pictures and such) it is fine.
Edit: I don't use facebook btw so I may be wrong from my troubleshooting experiences
Their privacy menu, for instance. They seem to have made it confusing on purpose, including the redesign. I guess intentional poor usability is a different issue, though.
As a new user of the site, it was never clear to me what each section was for. Trying to install apps kept leading me in circles. I clicked links and they never loaded. Facebook tells you pages are 404, when actually you're not authorized to view them. I didn't appear to be authorized to view someof my own pages... getting a 404 instead, which just looked like the site was screwed up (I guess it was, and it is, and as far as I can see it always has been and always will be). I don't even remember all the details, but I am very, very unimpressed with the design of their features.
They should try getting a CEO focused on something other than copying everyone else, but then, that's how the company started I guess.
However it is also a possibility that Facebook has grown large enough that the amount of new users is dwindling because it has already signed up the majority of willing users.
What could have caused a recent decline in the month-on-month new user numbers? Well, one possibility is a logistic growth curve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
based on Facebook having largely already saturated its easiest growth markets. No pattern of growth can remain exponential forever in a finite world.
Particularly in a discussion on if we are burnt out! You're only going to sign-up once, so burn-out isn't measured by registrations.
Here are there visitor metrics http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+google.com+bin...
Doesn't look like they are having any problems. Note google & bing are flat, facebook continues to rise.
That point is when Facebook has convincingly shown the ability to hold and monetize its users. Since it hasn't reached that point, registrations is the main thing that makes it hot. If it were to start shrinking before it was monetizing, it would be in serious trouble.
Google doesn't need to grow faster than the Internet. Facebook does.
So instead of comparing June 2010 to May 2010, you compare May 2010 vs. May 2009 to June 2010 vs. June 2009. So you could say something like, "Facebook registrations were up 30% YoY in May 2010, but were up only 2% YoY in June 2010. Actually, at this point, YoY growth rates might even be negative (i.e., Facebook may have signed up more users in June 2009 than it did in June 2010).
Month-on-month (MoM) comparisons can be interesting, but you need to put them in context to determine if seasonality is affecting the results.
At any rate, the number of new registrations, by definition, says absolutely nothing about whether users are getting burned out on Facebook. You'd need a metric like average time spent on the site per user per month to say something about that.
# Are we burning out on Facebook?
# Web abuzz on talk of Google Facebook killer
# Book about Facebook's beginnings may dim spotlight on privacy
# Facebook CTO: Don't forget Facebook is for sharing
# Facebook dev move won't stop rogue apps, say researchers
# Facebook 'likejacking' attacks continue with flesh appeal
# Is there a replacement for Facebook?
# Facebook CEO says mistakes made, privacy changes coming
# More than half of Facebook users may quit site, poll finds
# Social networks may be sharing your info with advertisers
"Yes, people could be getting burned out," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.
and remembered that Enderle is a jackass. I don't necessarily remember why Enderle is a jackass, but Gruber says so, so whatever he's in agreement with should be treated with extreme skepticism.
I think I read too much Gruber.
Perhaps facebook's reputation is starting to precede it.
(Though more people I am acquainted with continue to join. They just don't update much or at all.)