Facebook Keeps Changing, Facebookies Don’t Want To
Social Networks are big. How popular have social networks become? Social Nets and Blogs More Popular Than E-Mail!
Facebook is the current leader in social media life. It recently passed MySpace as the most visited social media site. For comparison, I put also included Digg, LinkedIN, and Twitter on the graph below…
One of the reasons they keep growing is that they keep making changes to who gets to be in the community, what they can do, and how they interact with the site and others. They don’t always get it right but they’ve been known to flex and still provide a product that more and more people want.
Robert Scoble outlined the history/future phases of Facebook with their audiences:
Phase 1. Harvard only.
Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.
Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.
Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).
Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.
Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.
Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.
Scoble says Facebook is moving from phase 4 to 5 and that’s where they will find their business model (after all, it’s a free service). Some of the ways they’ve done this lately include:
- Facebook Pages Get More Business Friendly and it looks like the change could really open up some very interesting applications for businesses.
- Facebook Advertising – An Opportunity for Deep Targeting at Very Low Cost is still a bit aquerd but it’s getting better (I think).
- A new layout showed up (again) that makes the New Facebook = Twitter + Friendfeed. For Non Geeks.
There are some things about the new layout I don’t like but there is a lot I do like. I’m finding it easier to share and keep up with friend’s activities better (especially since I just dropped 200+ ‘friends’ on Facebook just like Jesse Newhart explained in a video).
What is difficult (or not as intuitive) is finding what I call a “friend’s branding” — the list of groups we join and the applications we add to our profile to make us feel like we are more of an individual in the large Facebook sea.
However a lot of people don’t like the new layout. Check this screenshot from a search in Facebook for “new facebook layout”:
Even some of the Facebook employees don’t like it but CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to be daunted if the tipsters are to be believed. But I think Robert Scoble nailed it in talking about Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now. Scoble says:
Zuckerberg is smart. He saw that Twitter was going to make a crapload of money (that’s why he tried to buy Twitter) and instead of being depressed by being turned down…he decided to phase shift Facebook…Zuckerberg is a real leader because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to do what he thinks is best for his business…Zuckerberg is not listening to you because you don’t get how Facebook is going to make billions.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Facebook has made it through “Scoble’s phases” before and they have the backing and resilience to make it through this. My bet is they will continue to emerge, evolve, and still grow.
