When any phenomenon reaches a high level of popularity, its future and eventual decline must be considered. I have lived through the good times and the end of eMule, MSN, and a long (and geeky) list of similar cases, which I’ll spare you from reading. It will happen to Facebook too, sooner or later.
When a medium becomes popular, is mentioned on radio and television, and everyone (even an elderly person in a lost village in the Pyrenees where there isn’t even internet) knows about it, 20,000 ‘tricks’ start popping up like wild mushrooms that end up ruining it. And as we all know, what goes up must come down.
For some time now, a growing number of messages posted on Facebook are company promotions. I’m not talking about ads, that’s normal. I’m referring to original and creative annoying and questionably efficient practices that are becoming commonplace. Thus, we can see, for example, companies that force you to click ‘share’ to enter a raffle, get a discount voucher, or post a message on your wall indicating that you use an app or register on a website.
The average business owner has found out, late as always, that Facebook can be a great advertising medium. What was initially a real business opportunity for a few visionaries has become a common, annoying practice carried out by companies that, without even being sure of the results they will get, try to claim their piece of the pie. Because their brother-in-law told them ‘it’s what’s in fashion’, or they took a course on ‘Advertisin’ on the Interné, creative initiatives on Fasebuc’.
If we add to this Facebook’s recent stock market failures, its manifest inability to bring its business model to mobile devices, the bankruptcy of Zynga, and the fact that, inevitably, people end up leaving some products for newer ones, in my experience, this smells like the beginning of the end for Facebook.
I’m not saying it will happen tomorrow, but in the coming years there will be a significant abandonment, having left the peak of popularity behind. But well… we’ll always have Twitter.
