Is Facebook Doomed?
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Allan
2 years ago -
1778
views
MySpace has finally capitulated to Facebook’s growing popularity and announced a partnership that will see both social network sites working closely together. The unlikely alliance will mean that MySpace users will be able to login in to Facebook through their MySpace account. It will allow over 600 million Facebook users to move their likes and interests over to MySpace with just one click. The partnership will create a “real-time stream” of tailored entertainment content in which users will receive automatic updates on their favourite musicians and movie stars.
The deal will build upon a recent cross-post status updates between the two sites – currently a feature used by more than a million MySpace users. MySpace will also implement Facebook’s “like” button across its site.
The collaboration’s entertainment update feature is akin to Apple’s own long anticipated social network Ping, launched in September. Presumably spurred on by the emergence of Ping, Facebook has moved to consolidate its position as the world’s biggest social network. MySpace is now among more than a million sites which allow Facebook users to extend their social grasp to other domains.
However, according to one Internet expert, all that may be pointless thrashing in the wind as Facebook only has five years of dominance left. After that, claims Dr Jeffrey Cole of the World Internet project, its popularity will wane in similar fashion to that of other social sites such as MySpace and Bebo.
The World Internet project scrutinises how the Internet affects media consumption. Dr Cole predicted MySpace’s demise four years ago and now claims that Facebook will not fare any better at holding on to its users:
“The same thing will happen to Facebook as hit MySpace, but it’s going to take a lot longer. And it’s not going to be replaced by one big social networking community but it’s going to be fragmented.” says Cole.Watch this space? He got it right with MySpace……
Once the initial buzz of Facebook has died, there is very little to keep you there, unless you like wasting life on Farmville and the like.
There are better things to do with life other than Facebook.
People will go on deliberating about this subject until the cows come home, no one can predict where Facebook, let alone social media or the web as whole will be in five years time, let alone in six months.
Consider the astronomical uptake of Facebook in the last few years, will a network that holds so much valuable, personal data ever be redundant?
Assuming that all social networks will eventually go the way of MySpace is naive, what Facebook does does so much better than MySpace is allow businesses to connect with people, just look at Places and the upcoming Facebook deals, even if you hate Facebook you’d surely start using if it it meant you saved money…
Facebook has a reach that MySpace never did and it is transforming the entire web, making it more social, I don’t believe this trend will suddenly grind to a halt any time soon. Facebook is here to stay… For now!
I agree with Joe Johnson on that point – comparisons with myspace are meaningless as they are not targetted at the same audiences and facebook does things very differently. If anything, the bringing together of myspace functionality along with all the other sites now using fb connect can only strengthen facebooks position. Myspace never seeked to do this before, their game plan was never about this so comparisons are rendered pretty pointless.
Of course, if anything were to destroy facebook I would hope it would be http://www.myrealwall.com
But that would be dreaming! :-)
NO ! FACEBOOK WILL NEVER DIE !