An audience of two

Wednesday March 26, 2008

Rant: Facebook doesn't matter
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and then saved it as a draft and forgot about it. I planned to revisit it since I realised at the time that it's a bit of a rant, but what the hell.

People are going nuts over the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview at some conference in Texas. I'm not even going to link to it, if you don't already know every excruciating detail of it then you can find it here.

The problem I have is with the group-think that facebook somehow matters. It doesn't. It's just another dumb waste of time website. That's not to say that the concept of social networking is in anyway invalid, it's simply that social networking predates facebook and will continue long after it's gone. I was social networking on BIX when Zuckerberg was still in nappies. Internet search matters, but look what happened to Excite, AltaVista, Lycos etc.

So facebook is just one player in an expanding game. The idea that the company is somehow worth $15 billion is patently absurd; it's based on the fact that Microsoft invested $246 million in the company, whereas in reality they paid $246 million for advertising rights and got 1.6% of the company for free.

So why do I say it doesn't matter? Because people are fickle. The aforementioned Excite was once one of the top search engines, today it's gone. Something else came along and everyone drifted away. Facebook has nothing that anyone needs; nobody really needs to play Vampires and Werewolves, to publish their personal details online for anyone to see, to sell their demographic details to anyone in exchange for the right to throw sheep at each other.

Chances are that Facebook is not the next Google. It's the next hula hoop. It's the next pet rock. It's the next furby. And that doesn't just apply to facebook, it applies to all the social network sites. You'd better figure out a business model, a revenue stream and a backup plan, preferably one that doesn't utterly disregard personal privacy. Because there's a new idea around the corner that will make people realise how irrelevent you actually are.

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