Facebook fatigue
The disappointment of the social media giant’s public stock offering may only have confirmed what some were already starting to sense: Facebook’s best days may be in the past.
You gotta feel sorry for Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. He had the week so well planned: ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on a Friday, dressed in his best Sunday hoodie, to launch the much anticipated IPO of his $ 100- billion social media baby.
Saturday? That was for marrying his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan in the backyard of their Palo Alto home, he in a simple navy suit and tie and she in a delicate white dress, accompanied down the aisle by their Hungarian sheepdog, Beast.
Then it pretty much went downhill, as Zuckerberg’s ballyhooed public stock offering turned into a Black Friday nightmare. Facebook stock promptly bombed and along came threats of securities inquiries and class- action lawsuits and the ire of not a few incensed investors wondering just what happened to the promise of the golden- egg- laying goose.
Turns out Facebook doesn’t have as many friends as it thought.
Despite promising to use its powers for advertising good, for instance, FB hasn’t been able to crack the web commerce code as handily as it might have hoped. Even with its ability to finetune individual demographics, advertisers remain on the dawdle about leaving traditional platforms in favour of the digital billboard, even ones with 900 million potential buyers around the globe.
That reality bit hard when General Motors recently pulled $ 10 million in advertising with Facebook after discovering that few of us are actually paying attention to all those annoying ads that clutter the sides of our profiles.
And it would seem that FB users, us common folk, are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Zuckerberg’s folly.
I have 153 friends on Facebook, a piddling amount given I started the account in 2005, and I am a terrible Facebook friend. I don’t contribute much, except the occasional thumbsup “like.” I seldom seek out friends and am fussy about confirming new ones, and if I post a photograph or a comment, it’s likely to show off my grandchildren or my cat.
I am nothing more than a Facebook voyeur. I don’t like the new imposed Timeline, I certainly don’t read the targeted ads ( I just checked: finance, home care, diet) and I never link to videos that require me to sign up for another website. And I remain slightly resentful of all the invasions of privacy that I’ve agreed to.
Like millions of other users, many of my FB friends are people I seldom see, or know only by association through the newspaper, or perhaps another friend or family member. Only a handful of my FB mates post on a daily basis, because the truth is that most of us have become drive- by friends, dropping in for the occasional visit but not staying long enough for tea and conversation. It’s great fun reading what those few diehards are up to, about their vacations, their children, their weekends, their lunch, but the FB thrill is fading.
In many ways, Facebook is a victim of its own success, having been the Pied Piper of an information culture that demands a new Mcnugget of data every second of every day. FB has trained the world to communicate and socialize in a disposable fashion. Post a photo, the next day it’s gone, replaced by a different photo. Like this video of a philosophical cat? Wait five minutes and there’ll be another, so much information flitting across our screen that our built- in filters are working overtime.
Meantime, we hang on the edge of our keyboards, bored with what we have and anxious to subscribe to the next big thing. While FB was busy being the world’s biggest virtual coffee klatch, its cachet was also fading in direct proportion to its familiarity, as other diversions such as Twitter and Google Plus began appealing to our Internet fickleness.
What Facebook is learning, the hard way, is that there is no loyalty in cyberspace. Remember Myspace? Exactly. Myspace was the next big thing before FB was the next big thing.
As if Zuckerberg doesn’t have enough weighing down his slight 28- year- old shoulders, an Associated Press/ CNBC poll released in the days just before the IPO confirmed what has been in the wind for some time: half of Americans think Facebook’s popularity is on the wane.
That said, it’s unlikely that Facebook, or social media, is going anywhere anytime soon. But make no mistake: Somewhere out there in the wired weeds, a new hoodied technoguru is about to create the next big thing.