May 9, 2012 Facebook's Downward Spiral Begins

As Facebook prepares itself for one of the largest, if not the largest, IT IPO in history it's users are starting to sour on the social site. Over the years Facebook has tried to adapt to the evolution of the social landscape and position itself as the leader. However, they have reached a point where their advances, changes, and new features are at the expense of the regular users. When your entire business is dependent on the users, Facebook may be beginning to dig it's own MySpace grave.

As a user of Facebook for many year, I have grown tired of the changes and the shift away from what Facebook was to where it's going. Zuckerberg and company wants to control your information and remove social groups. Read between the lines and all of the security features, the new timeline, and the expanding web of ways your photos can be seen outside your network is making it clear Facebook doesn't want anyone to have any secrets, social circles, or self controlled privacy. This is not what social networking is about. Since the dawn of time humans socialize in small groups. Most people, not all, but most people who use Facebook are 'Friends' with people that specifically choose to share semi-private thoughts, photos, ideas, posts that reflect one side of themselves. Much like going to a bar to have a few beers with some buddies, the jokes, profanity, and behavior is not how you are around your family, boss, or even other types of friends. Until Google+ came along, Facebook didn't even let your group your friends. All or none mentality of who can see your posts. This is wrong and I think the users are ultimately going to get sick of it.

My use of Facebook has significantly diminished from posting family photos, off color posts, and liking things because I don't know who else has their security open and will see that indirectly. So I don't. I use it to keep tabs of distant friends and have automatic services posts updated to my timeline like GetGlue, FourSquare, Shazam and other benign posts. Facebook is no longer a place where I socialize like I used to. Why? Facebook has screwed it up to the point of not trusting it. Coming from an IT Security guru, that should say a lot.

So as Mark trots around the country getting ready to suck in billions, the users usage patterns are slowing down, Facebook loses more and more of its identity as it tries to be more and more of the Internet social police and controller of content viewing... and Twitter will continue to expand.

People like simple. I jumped to Facebook because it was far more simple and clean than MySpace turned into. Now Facebook is beginning to remind me of how MySpace was simple then got too full of themselves as they tried to cram every cool feature to the users and missed the point.

Time will tell but the industry experts are all saying that Facebook's reign will be short lived and they will go the way of MySpace, AOL, Yahoo... and soon Facebook will be on that list.

End of Line.

Posted in: Facebook