I just read a comment from what was likely a troll on some website I’ve never heard of. It read:
Facebook is a fad and only losers are on there. You people go on Facebook and try to get as many friends as you can but the reality of it is that none of you people really like each other or you would use the telephone to stay in touch. All of you Facebook people don’t really care about what your “friends” are doing and they don’t care about you either. Most of you people maybe have only one or two real friends…..right? But Facebook is a mirage because it makes you think you have lots of friends when you really don’t. Think about what you people are doing and how you are fooling yourselfs.
I’d like to dismiss this guy and move on, but his opinion (which I completely disagree with), is fairly prevalent. In fact, some recent poll says that half of Americans think facebook is a passing fad.
Let me just say — as a software developer, user of Facebook since ’05, and developer of 3 of the first 100 Facebook apps — I have seen the greatness that is Facebook. They jacked the world up and dollied themselves underneath. The world is dependent on Facebook, and they will become a revenue-cranking growth superstar.
- It passes boredom
- It maintains friendships
- It resurrects old friendships
- It sparks new friendships
- It’s extendable
- It’s integratable
- It’s a social news feed
- It’s a world news feed
- It’s a chat platform
- It’s a media sharing platform
- It’s a company of talented hackers
- It’s a place where small business promote themselves
- It’s the only place that some businesses promote themselves (not even a website)
- It’s Google’s big problem to solve
- It has created a massive queryable, crowd-sourced, graph of people, places, and things of the world
- They’ve captured 1/7th of the world
- They asked for all of your info, and you gave it to them
In short: They’ve consistently innovated throughout their existence. They blew the doors off of what everyone thought social networking was at the time (MySpace). For more than 7 years, they’ve improved rapidly, collected data, and grown their roots so deep into our way of life that I’m not sure those roots can ever be removed without something radical happening (massive privacy breach?)
If you think they’re going to fall on their faces now, you’re out of your mind. I’m long on Facebook, that’s all I gotta say.