Facebook, once more. The platform built by Mark Zuckerberg and his team is about the hit the main market, the Top 10 online, and faces a huge member turn over. The original target group, students, will soon graduate and probably refocus their time occupation and at the same time many new members have joined FB.
But there is one more reason for the expected change: the myspaceification of FB. A process which can’t be stopped anymore. A process responsible for both exodus and invasion. Exodus of students and geeks, the invasion by Joe and Jane Average.
Uglification
The introduction of F8 (Facebook applications platform) was the big breakthrough for non-students and myspace freaks to join FB. The huge plethora of useless time wasters such as Super Poke, FoodFight, Happy Hour and many more applications, turned FB within weeks from a much hyped platform in to the next MySpace. A MySpace with white background and thousands of multi-colored bitmaps on most profiles. Exactly what Joe and Jane love.
Fatigue
Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time. After having poked all your friends hundreds of times, there only are two options. Whether you have become the typical FB drone or you realize that what you are doing makes no sense at all.
Third possibility is that you have already been fired from your job because of all the working time you spent at FB.
Marketing
The implementation of sponsored platforms, multinational corporations using FB for marketing is nothing new. Many brands use Myspace or even LiveVideo.com for their marketing campaigns already. Facebook is nothing more than a new platform to those conglomerates.
For FB this opens the doors to the world wide internet user, the internet user who loves brands, labels and celebrities, but dislikes text-only sites. Commercial brainwashing.
Aggressive and Ugly Advertising
If FB/Microsoft manage it to keep the advertising, banner policy as is, the platform won’t suffer too much. The banners shown on FB are of acceptable visual quality. But who guarantees that application builders won’t soon build in fastmedia/clickmedia smiley and casino banners? Even application developers need to make money sooner or later.
Mix those four elements up and you have exactly what a websites needs to become really popular: a butt ugly looking flashing and blinking banner farm. Is it a surprise that 4 out of the 6 most popular websites according to Alexa are just as ugly time wasters: Yahoo, MSN, YouTube and Myspace (#1, #2,#4 and #6 accordig to Alexa.com).
The geeks and A-Listers, who prefer slick looking sites, will leave Facebook for exactly the same reason as they left Myspace for Facebook. Is the myspacecification of FB what Virb needs to finally go viral?
Originally posted on August 1, 2007 @ 3:25 pm