The only problem is that mostly wild and crazy kids populate the internet. Now that Oprah’s on Twitter, everyone my age is suddenly “meh, twitter” because everyone’s mom’s asking about it. As soon as our parents get on Facebook, the kids will abandon ship. I mean, the sensible ones anyway.
Well, and then there’s people like me, who categorically refuse facebook because science H. christ, send me a god damned email or instant message if you want to talk to me. Seriously, I haven’t owned and maintained CMFN for 10 years now to have people read my (non-existant) facebook statuses and blogs and crappily recompressed one size fits all photos.
Still, Facebook, which was launched in 2004 by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and spread through the Ivy League before opening to all comers in 2006, retains some gloss from those prestigious roots; it recently added its 200 millionth member, while MySpace’s rolls contain half as many. “From a branding perspective, Facebook is the high-status, trusted brand in the social networking space,” says BJ Fogg, a psychologist at Stanford who teaches courses about the service.
Wow, 200 million, all real names. You remember how many people got fucking whacked-out upset when they discovered the government wanted a unified federal drivers license database and all that. Then they go over and give up the barn to Facebook… who cooperates fully with law enforcement. We don’t need a unified federal drivers license database, we have the internet.
Just wait until the great internetconomic collapse comes and MySfaceBook has to be nationalized…
“Maintaining that will help them continue to grow quickly and bring on people who wouldn’t have thought of joining MySpace.” More users, obviously, means more advertising. Kirkpatrick estimates the site will bring in more than $300 million in revenue in 2009. “There are many reasons to believe that Facebook is increasingly an effective advertising destination,” he says.
Eventually, the advertising/user ratio will tip and people will flee. Ah yes, the last paragraph:
There are plenty of obstacles that could keep that vision from coming true. As a business that is entirely dependent on its users’ whims, Facebook must manage its relationship with them just so. The site has tended to treat its users brusquely during periodic redesigns; its most recent one led to a 1.7 million-member Petition Against the “New Facebook” group. For the site’s content police, though, the bigger risk is that they’ll execute their censorship in a way that upsets some users. Last year mothers on Facebook began noticing that photos of themselves breast-feeding were being deleted. As so many things do on Facebook, the reaction went viral. As of last week, more than 230,000 people had joined a group named Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene! which promotes videos and online “nurse-ins.” Facebook, though stung by the bad publicity, says it’s not too worried: users may join a protest group, but the fact that they haven’t quit the site altogether shows how sticky Facebook can be. It may not be making money yet, but Axten and his colleagues are playing a key role in the race to profitability—one deleted nipple at a time.
We will homogenize and whitebreaditize our content until it comes through the straw that advertisers like. Unfortunately, most of America is fine with that. Witness television.
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