Facebook Poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1810327]

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Facebook is Myspace 5 years ago is AOL 15 years ago. I see no reason to expect it to be any different.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Your frequency chart doesn't go to small-enough time periods. Addiction through intermittent rewards.

Which reminds me, I wonder what's on facebook now? I haven't checked it for half an hour.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, I did three minutes ago.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

My choice of "10 years" applies to its Russian users.

edit: LOL ... misread the poll. Still choosing 10 years.

[chess]

I reckon it will peak within the next 5 years, still be important for a particular niche market (like MySpace and bands) after 10, and close down within 20 but still be distinct as a historical phenomena out to that timescale (after which it will blend in with the whole Friendster/Myspace/Google+ social-networks era).

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'll plumb for 10 years, but it might have staying power. We don't have any real data on Social Networks, especially ones which have 800m+ users and still growing.

They definitely have aggressive mobile plans which involve essentially becoming *the* web OS which would put them into direct competition to Google. If, as I suspect, most people don't care about how they access web services, but rather the fact that they can, then they could be around a long time.

I don't think it's helpful to draw too many conclusions from mySpace or AOL.

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

I chose 20 as in 20 years people will still be talking about the facebook phenomenon, but probably in the past tense by then.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

I think FB has squandered a lot of potential over the years:
- FB Notes has barely changed since launch, when it could have supplanted Blogger
- FB Events is very useful, yet they haven't put together a Calendar view for it

I understand that their focus is very much on making their core functionality scale, and perhaps the data structure choices they are forced to make for scale make it impossible to actually branch out in logical ways. If this is the case, though, FB's future growth is equally constrained. It is ossifying.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I agree with the squandered opportunities. Its best advantage over other social networks is pretty much the number of users it has, and the fact that the user profiles* and status feeds are readable and uniform no matter who it belongs to.

*That new profile page they are rolling out looks MySpacish.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, they have a self inflicted problem imposed by success for the scale issue. Nobody sane would try to run a service with that many users with PHP and mySQL but they are now in a position that they can't really do anything but that. They may well have to rebuild the entire core at some point.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Initially mis-skim-read the question as being most likely lifetime, and picked 5y; if it's an upper limit on possibility then I wouldn't count any large organisation out.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

However, I plead that my Facebook is brand new (last week) and that I joined (and check in) only because I need access to one closed group, and am waiting for news on that group - and by a now-friend - of the birth of puppies!

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

'Important' is (I presume deliberately) quite vague. I think Facebook will wane in popularity (and possibly already is) but I think the prolificility* of it has genuinely revolutionised a lot of online behaviour (eg it is now more popular than porn, which MySpace never even approached) so even if it shuts down tomorrow it will still be regarded historically as having an important cultural impact.

If the question were 'how long will it be around for in the same way it is now' I think ten years.

Lizzie x

* Yes that is a real word.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I reckon it's probably got 10 years of life left in it simply because it's managed to capture so many people who don't otherwise seem to participate in web 2.0.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

One of Facebook's problems in the long term might be the age restriction, if they enforce it strictly (admittedly, I know several parents who are happy for their under thirteen year old kids to use FB. If another social network manages to catch a lot of people too young to sign up for facebook and they -stay- on that network and it gains an enduring popularity then all of a sudden a generation of people at school and university might be less likely to switch (since friends their age will be on this other network, and a bunch of older folk will be on FB)

Facebook doesn't seem to be doing new things with the core service any more - it's really just trying to limit how people use the service and what experience they get from it, while trying to push this limited service as a front-end or overlay for your normal internet browsing. As well, the more you get an increase in people spamming news stories that they've read, games they've played, things they've bought via the automated "share this on FB?" boxes everywhere, the more you will get people ignoring FB.

That said, they are already the biggest image host and are presumably one of the biggest (if not the biggest) messaging services too? It's interesting - you don't really hear anyone saying "Facebook is great because it does _______", at all. People say Facebook is good because other people are there, but people very rarely say that any of the functionality is actually good. (Probably because it is mostly rather lacking, but there's no other option if you want lots of people there)

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

10 years is probably fairly likely, but the "at most" phrasing in the question leads me to vote 20, which is the longest I see remotely plausible.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

IAWTC