Well, people's engagement with facebook has certainly declined from its peak years ago.
However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation.
There's plenty of room for new entrants that take slices of your friends and optimize that experience. For example, another network for just your family... offering a close, intimate experience, one you feel comfortable sharing all your baby pics on, etc. Another network for professional (sorry, LinkedIn already there). Another for your classmates. All sitting under the facebook umbrella that has your entire social graph.
But one thing that's clear about facebook is they are not at all focused on improving the user experience any longer. They are not unveiling new features that improve user experience. They are fully engaged with improving the advertiser experience. Maximizing the value of the data they have on you. Maximizing ad revenue. These aren't bad things and are obviously necessary, but when a company seems 100% focused on the revenue rather than the user, I think that signals the start of a decline.
Going back and readding friends on a new network is a great way to shed the years of non-friend buildup that has occurred without hurting any feelings.
It could definitely be advantageous - Facebook was the first exposure to most of the world of a social network. When it came along many people added & accepted friends they didn't care much about at all in a spurt of initial enthusiasm, before learning over time that that might not have been such a good idea.
But I still don't think that would be sufficient to overcome the massive Facebook network effect now.
> Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation.
I disagree. Firstly, you make it sound as if filling out some information about yourself (don't we do that all the time anyways?), posting some pictures, and updating your status is some overwhelming endeavor. For those of us old enough to have started on myspace and switched to facebook, it really was pretty seamless.
I'm not saying anyone should rush to develop the "next facebook", but I do think that the new entrants you speak of could easily become significant later on.
I agree that facebook seems pretty much stagnant when it comes to the user experience. I'm actually eager to see the new myspace once it debuts for that reason...
> Firstly, you make it sound as if filling out some information about yourself (don't we do that all the time anyways?), posting some pictures, and updating your status is some overwhelming endeavor.
But that's not what makes a social network. User profiles have existed since the beginning of the internet. A social network is a place to see and be seen. But this requires people--the more the better (usually). Facebook for better or worse, has already won this game.
I don't really get this idea of facebook being "stagnant". Perhaps they've already refined the concept of general social networking to its peak. It's an odd idea in SV that a site has to constantly roll out new "user experiences" to remain relevant. Facebook is a platform for attention-whoring. They do that just fine. The users themselves create the experiences.
Actually, they don't do that [attention whoring] just fine. They've actually severely diminished that experience with the new system that limits the exposure your updates get unless you buy a $7 promotion. This scheme is a disaster ... yes, charge Pages for it, but not regular individual users.
Why is it a disaster? As long as there is no feedback on how little exposure one's posts get, I don't see a downside to facebook with this. Being flooded with bad/uninteresting content was a real problem. Filtering one's stream was an important usability addition.
Well, I will say Google+ is pretty good, but for me it came too late. I already had social network fatigue and too much content already in facebook to do much useful with Google+ or to spend any real time with it. I kinda wish Google+ had come first.
"However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation."
Another possibility is that the next innovation for social networks will be effortless friend adding & management. I've never had a problem adding friends, but I find manually dealing with lists/groups/circles/whatever to be enormously painful so they're never current. The idea of separate accounts for separate "slices" of friends is appealing partly because it's both transparent and stable (ie Facebook can't change what's in my Twitter account), but it can't be the best possible approach, right?
I completely agree. They have yet to truly add value to their service that enriches my experience with their product. Coming up with more ways to sell advertisements is not a sustainable business model. Well, it could be, but I would hope that this does not continue to be the norm for Facebook.
However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation.
There's plenty of room for new entrants that take slices of your friends and optimize that experience. For example, another network for just your family... offering a close, intimate experience, one you feel comfortable sharing all your baby pics on, etc. Another network for professional (sorry, LinkedIn already there). Another for your classmates. All sitting under the facebook umbrella that has your entire social graph.
But one thing that's clear about facebook is they are not at all focused on improving the user experience any longer. They are not unveiling new features that improve user experience. They are fully engaged with improving the advertiser experience. Maximizing the value of the data they have on you. Maximizing ad revenue. These aren't bad things and are obviously necessary, but when a company seems 100% focused on the revenue rather than the user, I think that signals the start of a decline.