FaceBook is now the largest social networking site in the world; but in the fast-paced Web 2.0 era, today’s big winners can quickly turn into tomorrow’s losers. Even as FaceBook continues to dominate online social networking, upstarts such as the mega-popular Twitter are challenging FaceBook’s status.
Just as MySpace was a worldwide phenomena a few years back, and then seemed to be quickly overtaken by FaceBook as the dominant social networking platform, Twitter now stands poised to outdo both of these giants, and it’s popularity and relevance within popular culture is increasing at a remarkable rate.
The big question for FaceBook is how to ensure future success, and change the site in ways so it that stays familiar but keeps pace with new Web 2.0 developments. Accordingly, FaceBook is now opening up areas of the site’s code to third-party developers. This will allow independent programmers to develop a wide variety of FaceBook applications (or apps), and in theory, should help keep the site fresh and up-to-date.
What FaceBook hopes will happen is that third-party applications can be developed to allow users to stay connected to FaceBook, even when they’re not on Facebook.com. While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, in reality it could wind up backfiring in FaceBook’s, err…pardon the expression, face.
The problem is that, as new third-party applications make it easy to stay connected to FaceBook without actually being on the site, Web traffic to Facebook.com is likely to decrease drastically, prompting one BusinessWeek.com blogger to refer to the future of FaceBook as a “ghost town.”
And the blogger in question, Douglas McMillan, does have a valid point: if FaceBook users have an easy way to stay connected to their FaceBook page, friends, and status updates without logging on to Facebook.com. What’s going to happen to the millions of unique hits the site is currently getting every month? That’s right — they will fade away quicker than you can say “Netscape.”
In a sense, third-party applications could make FaceBook of whole lot more like its competition — Twitter. But is that really the direction FaceBook should be going in? After all, the Web already has one Twitter, why do we need another?
Allowing third-party apps is the risky move for FaceBook, and one that many observers think could wind up being the beginning of the end for the Web’s reining social networking champ. Unless, of course, they can find a way to monetize the immense popularity of the site, without using the on-site advertising which is currently their biggest income source.
Facebook is definitely one of the strongest social networking sites today. I do not know one person who does not have a facebook account. I noticed that the more people could do with one site (more pictures, more friends, more videos, more music), the more they keep that account and stay with that site. As I always say as customer, a great investment of my time would always be that product which could do a lot of what I want without having to jump from one place to another.
Comment by Melanie Romasanta — May 29, 2009 @ 2:42 am