Cringely bets that Facebook is getting so large that they are bound to fail and notes that as our social networks get larger, the VALUE of those networks becomes less and less.
Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.
Yes, I hide all the Mafia warriors and the Farmers and those people lately who are so thrilled to be breeding weird little animals. I hide as many of my inane friends as I can. I don’t join any groups and I am a fan of nothing, but it still doesn’t matter. There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.
He doesn’t offer any proof or rigor, but it’s true for me as well. Interesting that social networks appear to invert the network effect.
He also notes that for publications there is an optimal circulation size for an advertising base – making it quite possible to become too large to make money. Cringely’s suggestion is for Facebook to way to weed out the least profitable customers so the value to advertisers (and CPMs) is higher.
But Facebook doesn’t want to be Time magazine, they want to be Google – number of impressions is all. BUT if people stop getting value from the networks they’ve built in Facebook those numbers will plummet.
The right solution isn’t booting people from Facebook – the cost per user approaches zero. The RIGHT solution is fixing Facebook so even an incredibly large network is still compelling to the user. And the solution is dead simple in concept (if very difficult in implementation and design).
I don’t have 487 friends – I have a dozen networks of people with only a very small number of those people being in more than one network. Facebook’s networks help FIND people with similar interests, but do nothing to help MAINTAIN connections with those people.
The solution is personas.
If Facebook is going to kill off all the mailing lists, bulletin boards, yahoo groups, blogging networks, etc that allow me to keep my personas locked into different online spaces (which they are currently doing at a rapid pace), they are going to have to stop forcing me to lump family, friends, co-workers, long lost high-school friends, Thrashers’ fans, college alumni and neighbors into a single network.
Facebook’s list functionality sort of allows me to organize my networks and switch between them – but it’s clunky at best. What’s more it is something that should be automated by Facebook. They can see all those potential interconnections when I add a friend and should be able automatically drop them into the correct network. Furthermore it should be simple enough to figure out which persona I’m currently wearing based on my activities.
They’re not shy about ignoring privacy to sell ads, how about giving ME some of the benefits of the all seeing eye? If I’m looking at the activities of the other parents on my kid’s soccer team the ad targeting can be scary precise (and much more valuable.
Hmmm – a massive network of people that can be sold against in very specific niche interest areas and current activities…
sort of like Google adwords.
