Facebook : What went wrong?

Facebook is in decline. Everyday, I hear more people are talking about closing and deleting their accounts. What started out as a project by some college students that targeted to bring students from U.S. institutions together had expanded globally. There are reportedly about 400 million Facebook users worldwide.

Facebook teaches us that to do something that will gain attention, you should target the right audience. Young people are more technology oriented, and especially, college students are the best group to be aimed at because of their intellectual level, social structure and networking ability. Facebook was a success with college students. When Facebook started, there were other social networking sites such as Friendsters and MySpace. However, Facebook quickly surpassed the popularity of those other networking sites because of the environment and perspective that it created at that time. If you wanted to create a Facebook account, you needed to have a valid college/university email address. That gave users a sense of privilege that they are belonging to a limited group of people who share more or less same background. On top of limiting the users who could use Facebook, it also added one more restriction by allowing different privacy settings. During that time, Friendster did not allow users to have control over the display of the information. A lot of Friendster’s users are starting to get tired of their information being display openly. Facebook seemed to jump in the game at the right time. There are other features that contributed to the success of Facebook such as tagging. Facebook API allows the development of applications which can be played in groups by you and people in your friends list, and that also created the sense of belonging and community.

It is a very good social networking platform until a year or so ago. I think the main problem with the decline in the popularity of Facebook is the surge in users; as a consequence the privacy settings are less efficient. And also the role of the business comes to play in the picture. When you develop something because you want to, it is a totally different perspective from doing something to create monetary value. I cannot say that Mark Zuckerberg held no intention of making profit out of this whole venture. But at least, his initial effort seemed to be selfless.

Information is a very valuable asset in today’s world. People are willing to pay for information, and I think Facebook has an advantage of in the possession of the information of the users around the world. If you think current privacy setting in Facebook is good enough, you are wrong. If you want to totally limit the access of your information, there are so many steps involved. Some people will be smart enough to realize the shortcomings of Facebook, and I’m waiting for the day when Facebook will become obsolete.