As I’m sure most of us recall, there was a time when America Online was a huge and powerful internet juggernaut. It seemed that every seventh American was a dogged user of the service, and every seventh AOLer was an outright addict. Now, of course, it’s basically an afterthought.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the same thing is going to happen to Facebook–that by 2020, it will be remembered mostly in footnotes. Tell us how you think it will occur; tell us how Facebook has already (or is currently) sowing the seeds of its own downfall.
I’m not saying it won’t, but I think there’s a big difference. AOL got hugely popular because it was how you accessed the internet. In the days of dialup there were only a handful of (mainstream) ways to access Email and the WWW and AOL was the big player. To this day a lot of people’s parents still use AOL because as far as they are concerned AOL is the internet.
If you ask my dad to go to a website he’ll launch AOL*, type in his password, connect, launch AOL’s browser, type the URL into AOL’s default search page and click on the first link.
So yes, Facebook may go the way of AOL, but ISTM it’s like asking how gasoline powered cars will eventually go the way of Poloroids.
Having said that, I’m not sure. Facebook beat the crap out of myspace and I don’t see G+ even putting up a fight. I think part of the problem is that people have so much invested in Facebook at the moment. I remember a while ago someone asking me if I was worried about losing all the pictures on my phone and I commented that all the important ones were uploaded to facebook so I have them backed up there. I think right off the bat if someone were going to try to take Facebook’s place, they would want to come up with a way to transfer everything over to the new service. Also, that’s another thing, I don’t think Facebook will just fade away, I don’t think people will get tired of it, if anything it’ll get replaced by something better and people will move over, like they made the move from Myspace. It has to get replaced by something. Now that we have social media, it’s not going anywhere, I firmly believe that it’s here to stay.
You always hear people sarcastically saying “What do you think we did before cell phones”…well, now we’re even more connected. Now, not only can we get ahold of anyone at any time, we know where everyone is all the time.
OTOH, maybe the next generation of people will value more independence and privacy and won’t care to share every inane detail of their life. I suppose I could see that causing Facebook to go the way of AOL.
*For the record, he has Roadrunner, he’s always online, he can just click on the IE or FF icon.
The end of Facebook is inevitable IMV, just as every other industry leader succumbs to something better.
The people at Yellow Pages, Yellow Book etc still don’t know what happened to them. They should be where Google and Yahoo are. But they had an entrenched model and infrastructure and no idea that the world around them was changing-----until it was too late.
Somewhere right now there is an eighth grader playing with a computer and in high school he’ll start playing with some neat ideas and in time it will unseat Facebook.
Myspace (Friendster etc) never saw Facebook coming until it was too late. Facebook------sooner or later, and likely later-----will also get it’s comeuppance.
What Zombie said; Facebook’s collapse will mirror MySpace’s. It wasn’t that long ago that MySpace was an absolute juggernaut.
The precise manner of Facebook’s collapse won’t be the same. It can’t be the same - the company is not structured the same way. But like Myspace, or Yellow Pages or whomever, their model will suddenly seem antiquated, their brand will be damaged by a bad news story or three, and kaboom.
My take is Facebook’s decline will actually resemble AOL’s in several ways.
AOL was more than just an ISP. It was also a “walled garden”, containing lots of content & capability users could access without needing to venture out into the big, scary, chaotic WWW.
As a non-Facebook user myself, I’m locked out of almost 100% of what’s in there. Conversely, a Facebook user can spend days doing nothing outside the confines of safe, familiar, Facebook.
What happened with AOL was the content outside grew so big & so interesting, while AOL kept their walls high, that enough users abandoned the garden to explore the whole WWW jungle. And AOL’s business model, which depended on the walls keeping the revenue inside, collapsed. They could make some money as a bulk commodity ISP, but nothing like what they had earned as the garden-keeper.
So the trick for Facebook will be to make their walls leaky enough that people aren’t forced to choose between inside & out. The challenge for a big company with a big revenue stream is admitting that letting WAG 10%+ of the revenue leak out *now *is the secret to staying alive 5 years from now.
Will they have the long-term vision to do that? Maybe now, but not forever. Eventually they’ll get greedier.
And now for something completely different …
We USAians tend to think of the WWW as being a US-centered (or at least English-centered) thing. While that may have been true in 1995, it sure won’t be in 2015 or 2025. By then the Chinese or Brazilian or ??? equivalent of Facebook will be a lot more relevant on the worldwide stage than the US / English Facebook is now.
I think that in their quest for more and more revenue they will try to integrate a person’s personal information into places that they don’t want it. It’ll get to the point that when I visit a porn site, I will see which of my friends also visit there (and they will see that I visit). Or I will go to Amazon and see what my friends are buying (why does she need to buy a dildo?).
But MySpace wasn’t a juggernaut in the same way. MySpace’s appeal was pretty limited to teenagers and bands. That’s it. On the other hand, my mother is on Facebook. My computer-phobic boss is on Facebook. Facebook has addicting games like FarmVille and Words With Friends that you couldn’t get on MySpace. Businesses can set up shop on Facebook to keep the public connected without forcing them to leave their favorite website.
Facebook saw what MySpace did and did the exact opposite. If they collapse, MySpace won’t be the model.
Facebook already does that. Their “Like” button is ubiquitous on pages across the WWW. And it allows Facebook users to share what they’re looking at outside the walled garden with other Facebook users. Who then go to these sites and see more “Like” buttons that drive them right back to Facebook.
Facebook may shrink as more people view it as a novelty, but it’ll never collapse. And I have my doubts that anything will ever supplant it.
Yip. Me too. Zuckerberg is already having to push to get people on Facebook to share more stuff. The next thing is going to make everything you’ve ever done on Facebook available to everyone. It’s already been announced. And the last update had nearly all of my friends posting, asking me to put them on “important updates only” so they wouldn’t share so much, since, again, he made them share more than they wanted.
So yeah. One of these times, he’s going to push too hard, and something else will be there to catch people. The only other way I see a downfall is if advertisers finally realize that the information they are getting isn’t worth nearly what they are paying for it.
Everyone I know who likes Facebook doesn’t really like Facebook. They like the fact that all their friends are on Facebook, but they don’t particularly like the service itself. It’s seen as quirky, frustrating, and confusing. People put up with Facebook because it has critical mass and they’ve learned to live with its drawbacks.
That lack of loyalty to Facebook itself (as opposed to the community that inhabits it) makes Facebook vulnerable.
When I think of the long term evolution of AOL, I don’t think they could have come up with a better plan to achieve irrelevance if they’d consciously tried.
Facebook may be doing the same in their own way. For one thing, their disregard for the right to internet anonymity is appalling. They are also implicated in a disturbing trend in online newspapers to require readers to log in through Facebook in order to post commentary. Plainly and simply, people don’t like to be tracked online and I think this is going to hurt them.
IMO Facebook is taking dead aim at its own foot even as I speak, and the safety’s off.
“Implicated” is not the word you’re looking for there. Facebook offers the code for websites to use Facebook usernames in their commenting systems for free. It has nothing to do with the fight against Internet anonymity and everything to do with a) the fact that it’s a low cost solution to an expected standard feature of web pages in 2011 and b) people forced to post under their real name are less likely to be dicks.
My 83 year old aunt still uses AOL. Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, she showed me a letter from them that she didn’t understand. When I read it I realized that what they were saying was that if she got a high-speed connection and used it to log in to AOL, they would charge her no more than they used to charge her for the dialup service they provided. Of course, she would have to get that high-speed connection at her own cost, although they hid that fact in a footnote. At that time, she had no thought of getting a high speed connection. But in the meantime she has and she still pays her fee to AOL every month. I am not sure why she does this, but I think part of the reason is to keep her email address. I assume they would refuse to forward if she quit. Or even if she didn’t. For 7 years, I paid our phone company for high-speed internet and they provided “free-of-charge” an email address which, fortunately, I never used. I didn’t realize that I came close to having the service cut off because they were sending bills to that address. Eventually, they sent me an actual snail mail warning and I was able to get them to add it to the phone bill. So when I switched my phone and internet service to the cable company (aside from general incompetence, they took a week to replace a squirrel-eaten cable to the house which left me with no phone or internet service for those seven days) I didn’t have to worry about a dead email address.
I don’t actually like Facebook much. I use it to track the doings of my grandchildren. I joined when a friend mentioned in an email some facet of one of their lives that I was unaware of. But now I know some things about my aunt’s granddaughter that she doesn’t because she refused to join Facebook.
As to how it will eventually fade away, who knows. Many car companies have disappeared, but Ford is still going strong. On the other hand it matters not at all if my next door neighbor drives a different car than mine, but is there room, really, for another social networking service. Twitter (which I am not on) is something of an alternative, but it doesn’t do much that Facebook does. So they could be entrenched for a long long time.
Nope. I know several people with @aol.com email addresses that haven’t paid a dime to AOL in years. They let you keep it and you log in to their mail site to check it, so they must get some ad revenue that way.
