I read an article earlier which talked about how many key executives are departing. The article goes on to discuss how Facebook has been slowly losing its luster following the decline after its IPO. With the reports of the NSA spying on Americans as well as how teenagers have slowly been moving away from Facebook to avoid their parents, you have to believe that the long term prospects for Facebook, as it stands, does not look positive.
Yet the issues are deeper than these facts. Part of the issue is that the social networking platform over time has introduced numerous of controversial changes that caused people to lose faith in the company. As the company is concerned about revenue, Facebook has focused a lot of its efforts in terms of marketing and advertisement, two elements that the average user of such things tend to find intrusive. For instance, instead of seeing information from your friends, you only receive selected information with ads and other intrusive elements flooding your news feed.
I feel that most people who go to Facebook are concerned about what their friends are doing rather than having irrelevant information constantly being blasted at them. Since the top items are algorithmically selected as well as those which people pay for, chances are that people miss out on a great deal of important information and updates from their friends.
In Japan, people faced a similar situation with Japan’s premier social network (or rather former premier SNS) Mixi. Many people ended up becoming burnt out and eventually quit. Perhaps, Japan’s situation provides a prophetic glimpse of what will happen to Facebook. Even with such an example, we have other social networks like Friendster and Myspace that grew, evolved and even went away. In those cases, something simply better appeared and people ended up jumping boat.
With Facebook, the primary assets it contains are the users and the relationships between those users then people’s photos. The idea here is that the people have invested a great deal of time and effort into locating their friends and uploading photos to the site. So the question is whether or not people are willing to do it again similar to how people migrated from Friendster and Myspace?
From a personal note, I’ve noticed that more people are deleting or deactivating their accounts. Some of the more tech and news savvy people felt the NSA blow up easily motivate reasons to remove themselves from Facebook. Even before the NSA scandal broke out, I knew people who quit because of (false) rumors that Facebook intended to charge their users. In other cases, people end up deleting or deactivating their accounts for personal privacy reasons such as avoiding stalker or preventing their companies from prying into their lives.
And though Facebook claims to be focusing more on mobile, they might already be too late. Worse yet the recent discovery of how the Facebook Mobile app uploads users’ phone information and contact lists without their consent just puts another massive damper in Facebook’s already suspicious trove of dirty laundry.
The other thing is that just from a technology point of view, Facebook really is crap. Whatever innovations they are performing seem to be utterly hidden from the average user. Certainly, we see the constantly morphing UI but there really isn’t much that you can say is special or useful/must-have features. These are just iterations that are forced onto users without any warning. Take the giant search bar as an example. Visually, it might serve some purpose but there isn’t anything great that has come out of it.
Then you have the shifting backend APIs that most developers dread using. Anyone who had the misfortune of integrating any aspect of their system like Facebook Connect can attest to the unnecessary complexity and the almost whimsical moving target of their system. If more users slowly depart from Facebook, then implementing the single sign on feature will end up being an ineffective, high cost headache.
Beyond all these aspects, Facebook internally is a mess. Outside of the recent departures of various notable executives, Facebook still exist in a start up mentality yet with the size of a fairly decent sized company and the accountability of a bank. A friend of mine talked about the security on their campus and how he was constantly patrolled while visiting for a meeting. Naturally, a company with the secrets to a good deal of the world’s population must guard its information well. Yet this seems contrary to the atmosphere the company wants to exemplify.
Add to the fact that Facebook has a pretty rigorous hiring methodology as well as notorious long hours. I’ve read reports that people are expected to work 6 days a week, 15 hours a day. The Hack-a-Thons that Facebook has popularized are nothing more than an euphemism for unpaid extra hours. I’ve heard how employees tend to be belligerent towards each other on the tech side at times and even their development system is one of a negative feedback loop. Certainly, for a veteran, non-high end developer, Facebook looks quite uninviting.
Ultimately, Facebook puts itself in danger because of their practices. Facebook biggest risk is that they can lose everything they’ve created in a second the moment a superior competitor arrives or if somehow they alienate their audience (which they are slowly doing). As a company, you always must ensure the trust between yourself, your product and your customers. With all the malpractices well documented, Facebook constantly does little beyond your average PR work to comfort their users.
Here’s the thing though. Facebook is incredibly useful as technologists in general have a need for a universal user database. Facebook comes closest to this notion of a single sign on type of platform. However, my feeling is that just like the internet, there should not be a single body that houses nor governs this type of technology and information. Since the information is collected from people around the world, the platform itself must remain neutral for it to act as a truly viable service. It cannot reside in any country nor be owned by anyone specific at the end of the day. Facebook violates these principles, which makes it a clear threat.
If Facebook wants to continue in its mission, it must abandon itself as a corporate entity within the US, Mark Zuckerberg must step down, the company must relinquish its status in the stock market and the technology running Facebook must be spread around the world and housed in all markets, locked away by a neutral body. It should be operated exclusively as a charity or self-funded somehow. Further progressing on its current course, Facebook will most likely be threatened by another upstart with a better platform suited in the interests of the users.