So after a year of playing with Facebook I move back to a blog. The reason, well, I think the days of Facebook may be limited.
A long time ago, before what we now know as the internet, I wrote a paper for the office – I suggested looking at standardizing on TC PIP, I suggested broadband as the technology to look for, I even predicted VOIP and who was likely to take the market lead. In those days people used the internet to send emails – the web was hardly known. It wasn’t that I was an IT genius or anything, it was just common sense to me. I guess if I had bought shares I would have made a fortune.
In the same way I would never have bought shares in Facebook. You see, for one, there will be an EarPad, or a NoseJournal, or something else coming along in the near future that will have something better. On top of that Facebook makes it’s profit from push advertising. In my experience junk mail, spam and other forms of push advertising just do not work. The desperation to increase profits is becoming more and more obvious, with people having to work harder to find free ways of sharing information. The free options appear to be closing to people. And that new service that will start soon will most likely offer free something.
Facebook in one sense is an option for somebody that doesn’t want to build a webpage, or blog or something similar. Myspace seems an interesting compromise, it offers the ability to build a personal space, and offers social networking. But still I can’t see a good financial model behind it.
The more I have been thinking about it the more I have been wondering how big a difference there is between Facebook and the mail list collections used by spammers. The concept is to offer people something that will encourage them to release their identity. These details are then collected and can then be traded to others that can force advertising on them. Is this really a social network, or is it just a complicated form of phishing? My guess is that the changes Facebook will need to make to stay attractive will not allow them to make the profit they need. Perhaps because of anti-spam laws if nothing else.
And what is the future, well, perhaps there will be a way to operate as profits fail. Or perhaps the system will close overnight. What happens when the Facebook we all love closes in ten minutes? So today I used by yahoo account to download all my contacts from Facebook and transfer them into my email address book. And today I switched back to my blog. I will still keep Facebook running, but I think it is time to get prepared in case it doesn’t.
