Has Facebook peaked? The decentralization of social networking.

by daniel ~ March 10, 2009

At a quick glance, the future appears very bright for social networking website Facebook.com.  Facebook has doubled its US audience in the last year and, according to Quantcast, Facebook is now the #6 most visited website, and gaining, on #5, YouTube.  

However, without even addressing the issue of how Facebook doesn’t really generate significant revenue relative to its reach and brand recognition, I contend that Facebook should beware the unavoidable onslaught of the decentralization of social networking.

Is Facebook actually on the decline even as its audience continues to grow?  Scholars still debate whether a single event led to the fall of the Roman Empire.  Most agree that there is no one, specific act or individual that caused the decline but rather a series of events over time.  General consensus seems to be that the Roman Empire simply became too big and unmanageable and ultimately morphed into smaller, lowercase “e”, empires. 

Although Facebook’s audience continues to grow, the one-two punch of their recent Orwellian privacy policy mini-scandal, and the upcoming Twitter-ization of their homepage, perhaps signifies something ominous.  Another bad sign is the aging of the Facebook audience.   My niece and nephews don’t like that their 45 year old mother is now monitoring their status updates.   They’re going to move onto the next, shiny new thing before too long.

Further, with the explosion of Twitter and similar microblogging properties, and the rise of companies like Ripple6 and Direct Message Lab which focus on social networking via brand-associated applications, the notion of a centralized website or platform for mass microblogging seems to be antiquated. 

Perhaps Facebook, like Julius Caesar, should beware the Ides of March.

Daniel Fries is an online marketing and advertising expert. Connect with him on LinkedIn here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielfries