Posts Tagged Facebook
Losing interest in Facebook
Andy Stubbings writes:
“If you want to know how people will use technology tomorrow” a popular saying goes, “look at what young people are doing today”.
To add to the bubbling anti-Facebook resentment that we have discussed here before, we’re seeing growing signs of disenchantment and dipping enthusiasm for Facebook amongst younger people. One survey of teens by gaming site Roiworld shows one in five are using Facebook less; the main reason for this is ‘lack of interest’. After the buzz around ‘defriending’, there seems to be more interest on ‘deactivating’ or leaving the site – apparently quite an exhilarating experience, at least according to this account of a ‘post-college calibration’. And there are earlier discussions of why young people leave social networks – there’s too much drama, it’s not their space anymore, and people prefer face to face interaction where possible.
Curiously, this also tallies with a general trend that we have picked up with our Global Monitor survey this year – when asked, people in almost every country overwhelmingly expressed a preference for a small number of quality connections they can rely on rather than a large quantity of connections they can call on (levels of agreement are practically the same across all age groups as well – which you might not necessarily expect from those gregarious Millennials). Facebook’s business model is built on the opposite assumption – that people want to continually add as many contacts as possible (and then lump them all together in the same group as their ‘friends’).
There has been attention given to the fact that the average age of Facebook users is increasing, often arguing that this is a sign that the site is broadening its appeal by going mainstream. However, I’d suggest, tentatively for the moment, that a fall in engagement amongst younger people – and in this context the leading edge – represents a decline that will eventually ripple out to a mainstream made up by mainly by over-30s, a decline that will accelerate as soon as a genuine alternative to Facebook emerges.
Facebook isn’t growing up; it’s growing old.
The image is from the site of the web designer Sharath G, and is used with thanks.
Add comment 2 August 2010
Facing off about privacy
Andrew Curry writes:
The current row over Facebook’s successive changes to its privacy settings has several strategic implications for the way that businesses – not just in the digital sector – relate to their customers. In case you’ve missed the story: Facebook has radically reduced the default privacy settings for its users since the autumn of last year, meaning that users are likely to be sharing far more details across the internet than they previously did. (I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but a visit to ouropenbook.org gives a sense of the scale of it.)
The reason? Well, the company says that ‘radical transparency‘ is good for you, in a moral sense. Others say that it is part of a long campaign by Facebook (two steps forward, one step back, according to Nick Carr) to set itself up as the owner of its users’ online identity, which is a more lucrative proposition than being a mere social network, even one with several hundred million members.
So what are the implications of this for businesses?
#1: When the mental map which your customer has of your product or service becomes too divergent from their experience of it, the business suffers. (This is what happened when Gerald Ratner described one of his company’s products as ‘crap’). In the case of Facebook, the actual experience is no longer represented by the map. The researcher danah boyd has explained this well:
A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping. Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.
#2: Privacy isn’t dead, although it is fashionable for digerati to say so. People still expect organisations they do business with to maintain appropriate levels of privacy – and to be able to check these for themselves. We think that this expectation increases as the web becomes more ubiquitous and more portable, and there are more opportunities for breach. At least some users will engage reluctantly because of fear of theft, fraud, or inappropriate social exchanges. In the digital world, companies which take care of their users’ privacy will be less profitable in the short-term, but more sustainable in the long-term.
#3: Facebook is effectively polluting the “commons” represented by the internet – all of the public resources and protocols – through self-interested behaviour. It is possible that other suppliers which also depend on a trusted internet for their business will intervene; Google, its own privacy problems notwithstanding, has done a little of this recently. But usually what happens when public interest goods are polluted by commercial interests is that regulation follows. The cases brought against Facebook under trade and competition law, along with the initial responses from privacy regulators, are harbingers of this.
The cartoon at the top of the post is one of a string of acerbic strips about Facebook at the excellent Joy of Tech, and is used here with thanks. You may enjoy this one as well.
Add comment 25 May 2010
