Nov

27

Why Facebook Will Fail

November 27, 2007 |

Cory Doctorow, in InformationWeek, sums up the reason why Facebook will ultimately fail:

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Perhaps we can call this “boyd’s Law” for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers.

The root of this problem is obviously in the fact that Facebook used to be a network for college students, not for Robert Scoble. Even when you sign up today, you are being asked if you are looking to ‘date’ or just ‘play around’.

Facebook opened itself up to the rest of the world, but it expects everybody to be an undergraduate at heart. And given how infantilized American students are already by the system, that, by default, has to create problems in the long run.

Maybe it is time for a paradigm shift at Facebook. Or maybe we need to use a more ‘professional’ service instead.

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