Facebook's fortunes are faltering on the stock market, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. While pundits point to a number of culprits -- declining user activity, competition with mobile, and so on -- these are just symptoms of a more fundamental flaw at the heart of the social network. Ironically, it's even emblazoned in the company’s IPO filing as its core operating philosophy:
Authentic Identity. We believe that using your real name, connecting to your real friends, and sharing your genuine interests online create more engaging and meaningful experiences... Authentic identity is core to the Facebook experience, and we believe that it is central to the future of the web.
The Facebook corporation's premise is patently, provably wrong. Quite a lot of our genuine interests are too intimate, embarrassing, controversial, shocking, depressing, or even just too boring to share with some or most of our friends. Facebook's very nature as a real-name social network forces us to interact in a constant state of self-censorship, always anticipating the potential disapproval from each and every one of our friends (and our friends' friends) in every update, like, comment, and share.
Facebook has attempted to obviate this problem by allowing users to transmit selected updates to selected friends, but besides being unwieldy, that fails to address a fundamental fact: All of us have genuine interests we would never share with anyone, even our very closest friends, certainly not in an online context connected to our real-life names. Beyond the petty incursions of personal privacy Facebook makes us face everyday, Internet sociologist danah boyd has pointed out how social networks' demand for real names can even be oppressive to the underprivileged.
There are real financial consequences to all this. Where Facebook has hoped to fully capture the social media marketplace, their rival Twitter keeps growing and keeps earning money. One reason for this: Twitter doesn't require real names. As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram noted:
[Twitter] doesn't really care what your real name is -- all it wants to do is connect you to the information that you care about. And if that information happens to come from a 'real' person, then so be it; but if it comes from a pseudonym, then that’s fine too.
This pseudonymous ecosystem also makes Twitter more valuable than Facebook as an advertising platform. Since their real-life names aren't necessarily connected to their Tweets, Twitter users are far more likely to express and engage with a fuller range of their actual interests.
We have pretty much reached a point where Facebook enjoys 50 percent market penetration of all 2 billion Internet users in the world. Historically, Facebook usage plateaus whenever it reaches 50 percent of a country's online population. With so few countries left to conquer, I believe it's likely the social network has finally reached the limit of its usefulness as a platform for expression.
Outside its well-trimmed gates, the pseudonymous Internet will continue to grow and thrive -- not just on Twitter, but on all the many other online sites where pseudonyms still dominate, such as YouTube, Reddit, and Flickr.
It's difficult to calculate just how large the pseudonymous Internet is, but in aggregate, it's likely to be just as active as Facebook itself. For instance, the total user base of virtual worlds and MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, where people express themselves through avatar names, is probably over 200 million. In great part, the pseudonymous Internet will continue because of Facebook, as people seek places online to express who they really are, unfettered from the restrictions of their real-life names.
None of this means Facebook is doomed, and I seriously doubt forecasts of its demise by 2020. Some level of authentic real-world identity is important in some online social contexts (particularly among our pre-existing networks of family and friends). That's why Facebook has managed to capture so much of our Internet activity. But because of its very structure, its actual centrality on the Internet will never be obtained. To assume otherwise is like arguing that just because everyone's name is listed there, the telephone book is still important.
— Wagner James Au is a writer and consultant in social media and gaming. He blogs about virtual worlds at New World Notes. Follow him on Twitter: @SLHamlet.
Their mission may be noble, but they keep changing the playing field. For companies ambitious enough to start a facebook presence, this has to be tied to and identity assumed to be factually accurate.
Then the ever changing landscape dealing with privacy issues, settings, app permissions, permutations and other difference making differences, makes it feasible that the investment in this SM tool as a reasonable tool to build community is itself an ever changing, ever evolving metric that is itself ever harder to quantify.
This makes it increasingly difficult to justify the investment in the facebook as a business entity, unless of course you have a dedicated staff or service person who keeps themself abreast of this ever changing landscape.
Sometimes evolution of a product or service takes a strange turn. Not all products are good for everything.
Facebook has been very good at connecting people. It's just that once you're connected, you may wonder why.
I think the difference with FB is that their mission is more self-serving than their competitors; which is why Twitter and other systems are still growing, as Wagner James points out.
So now that FB has a profit line to be measured against, their mission has come into tension with their statements. Which is why I fully agree with Wagner James, I think they are less successful because they do not have as valuable a mission as others do. Over time, I believe this will become more obvious.
Perhaps as a way to use Facebook's strategy against it, I've seen folk who create fantasy FB pages, kind of mixing reality with made-up names, fictional dates of birth, etc. This has to wreak havoc with marketing stats, no?
I have the strong impression that Facebook's mission was to create an online space for people to share their lives in a post-privacy environment. But its mission must now be to maximise returns for its shareholders. And I think there's some tension.
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When an Internet icon crumbles, can we learn anything from its passing? Case in point: The WELL may go out of existence soon, and from a certain perspective, that's a surprise.
Tumblr recently hired an “embedded journalist” to cover its user community, causing some to scratch their heads: Why would a social media company pay a reporter to write about its own customers?
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
The US government is funding controversial projects to collect daily Internet activity, including Web searches, Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, and the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. Its goal is to map these interactions to predict social behavior, such as protests.
The US boasts a commitment to "Internet freedom," but in practice that commitment falls short. What Internet freedom really means is freedom of the mind.
Our online communications and privacy are being threatened by governments and corporations. Eben Moglen believes it's time for a People's Internet, made possible by "Freedom Boxes."
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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