Is Facebook Drowning Itself?

Ah, Facebook, don’t you ever learn?

Yesterday, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, changed all its users email addresses to some silly, impossible to remember number@facebook.com.

Doesn’t matter what you set your default email address to on your contact page, it was changed to the social network’s own email system.

Thanks for telling us about the change. Hell, don’t you knock first? Wouldn’t it have been more polite to ask us users first?

Yes it would have, but that’s never been Mark Zuckerberg’s way. The young self-made zillionare that founded Facebook has never been one to care about the 400 million members when making dramatic changes to their personal information, why would he care about how people contact you from their site?

Over the years, under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has got flack from members for making changes affecting the use of personal private information, which have created even more tension between the social network’s top brass and various governments around the world.

Facebook has always had the pig-headed blindness to turn on these new “features” or “enhancements” as they refer to them, forcing their members to either turn them off, or disable them after the fact.

If it wasn’t for all the media hype around these changes, most wouldn’t know about them – thanks Facebook for letting us know.

For years we have tolerated this rude behavior – everyone’s on Facebook. But the social networking landscape is changing.

 

Twitter is still king for short status updates, YouTube is the video social network which is always on, and dare we say Facebook is being given a run for it’s money by Google+?

The world’s largest and most popular search engine began a social networking service recently, called it Google+ (or G+ for short) and it is increasingly growing as Facebook continues to give the middle finger to its users and government regulators.

Google+ -- so far – has learned a thing or two about being polite, and not forcing changes upon its users. G+ seems to go out of their way to make privacy settings simple, so you know exactly what information you are sharing and with whom. And the Google+ interface is visually stunning, placing an emphasis on the images associated with the post, making it a joy to browse.

Back when Facebook began, it was the only game in town. People joined often sceptically like myself, not so much to network socially, but to catch up with friends and family from years gone by.

When most started their Facebook pages, we added everyone we used to know, but had lost touch with, because there was no one else using Facebook that we knew to add.

Social networking was a new world, where people were more caught up in the ability to actually connect with old friends and family, instead of just becoming popular.

These days, the popularity bug has bitten most social network platforms, so it’s not who you know, it’s how many. 

And that popularity thing extends beyond the amount of friends, fans and followers, to the actual networks, so the more people saying good things about your social network, the more likely people will use that social network.

Just look at how quickly Pinterest has grown, thanks in part to the positive hype, while the once popular Digg has been long since forgotten, due to lots of negative talk on the social networks and in the media.

The more people complaining about your social network – Facebook take note – the fewer people using your social network, and eventually that social network dies. Myspace was once thought to take over Facebook, but now, most don’t even mention it except when talking about social networking relics from the past. If it wasn’t for the handful of musicians using Myspace, it would have been dead and buried long ago.

Popularity might not be the best judge of character, but it certainly has economic power -- if your once popular product or service suddenly falls out of favor, people stop using it, and the business dies.

Just look at Research In Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry – once the primary smartphone, RIM ruled the stock market. These days, RIM is the butt of jokes and speculation about the future of the company, as they have failed to keep up with innovations in smartphone tech, and they have lost focus of their primary user-base.

If Facebook continues to alienate and offend their user, as other social networks mature and expand, eventually Facebook will be just like RIM – barely able to float in the cyberspace sea of change.