Tuesday, August 3, 2010

stub: why i wont have a facebook account in 10 years

as facebook and "the internet" merge, the reasons for having an account in the first place recede. facebook originally made it easy to connect to people, but as advertisers, politicians, and other interested parties find various ways to get themselves on your feed, you'll have to wade through more and more muck to actually connect to people in the way you originally wanted, which subverts the whole point of being on there.

so in my opinion facebook is at its apex right now. they'll plateau in the immediate future if they havent already. i dont think they're going to fade into irrelevance, simply by virtue of inertia, but its hard to see anything really exciting in their future. and if it winds up as just a way for the government to tie your ip address to your actual name (see GG here) , some negative PR could push people on to some other system.

in their battle with google for the internet, i'm backing google.

2 comments:

Katie said...

http://www.economist.com/node/16646000?story_id=16646000

Pat said...

yeah, its large. which is potentially why it may not be going anywhere.

but thats about it. nothing they do - besides scale - is hard or irreplicable. and what they want to do next - be the gateway through which users access the entirety of the rest of the internet, may rub a lot of people (like me) the wrong way.

speaking of which, they should build a browser. i bet they're building a browser.