The Unraveling of Facebook

Preface: These are my own personal observations of where I think social media is now, and where I think it is headed in the near future. All claims below reflect my own personal opinion based on my research during my time at Frucket.

At the peak of Pax Facebook, it was the center for all things social media. Photos, videos, statuses, news, and event planning.

This was however, very short lived. It seemed as if the individual features of Facebook were spawning their own stand-alone apps that were quickly gaining traction.

In an ironic microcosm of the “large corporation vs startups” dynamic, Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine took Facebook’s photo/video sharing feature and ran with it to their own success. Twitter took command of the statuses and news features of Facebook. Even Facebook realized that one of it’s own core features, Messenger, had to be given it’s own platform. And thus, we observe an unraveling of Facebook’s features.

There are many reasons why this happened. Users just want to keep things simple. With such a big juggernaut like Facebook that was loaded with a complete set of features, users were not sure how to use and perceive the app. With something so multipurpose and big, users turned to more simple options. And that’s how apps focused on a singular purpose/feature, making them easier to understand, became much more accepted.

The last feature that has yet to be unraveled from Facebook is event-planning, and there’s good reason. Event-planning involves human collaboration, which spikes the difficulty up drastically.

In order for an event-planning app to succeed as the next “Facebook-feature” spawn, it needs to be group collaboration-focused, fun to use, and aimed to the masses.

Current event-planning tools lack a group collaboration focus —the closest one to this allows users to arrange things themselves and then invite friends in. There needs to be a way for groups to collaboratively plan an event. “Fun to use” and “aimed to the masses” are also necessary properties. Current event-planning tools are mainly focused on setting up meetings for work. That’s not fun, nor is it focused on the masses (i.e. non-professionals).

There are also 2 types of event planning: short-term and long-term. Short-term event planning entails setting up a dinner, study session, or hangout within a few hours to a few days. Upcoming apps like Wedge, Blink, Klutch, and Down to Chill are busily moving in on this space. Long-term event planning is like FB events, except there needs to be something that is much better. There needs to be a focus on group-collaboration and an emphasis on a social media-esque mentality to be geared towards the masses.

Also, a key nugget is that long-term event planning requires 2 key components: an idea list and a planning stage. The idea list is a list of all possible ideas that the group is interested in doing in the long-term. The planning stage has all the usual event planning tools to plan out those ideas. The key takeaway here is that the idea list feeds into the planning stage. Because of the nature of long-term group plans (i.e. lack of spontaneity), there needs to be a place to put down all these ideas so when the time comes to plan the group can easily remember what the ideas for plans they want to do were.

So event-planning is the last frontier of social media. The spaces for photos, videos, personal news, world news, and messaging have all been explored and conquered.

Within the next year or two, two apps will emerge in the event-planning space, one for short-term planning, and one for long-term planning. And they will join the ranks of the big social media juggernauts today.

At the end of the day, Facebook is not going to become irrelevant. While Facebook’s individual features have broken free and become successful on their own, Facebook will always be the home they connect back to, the central hub for all social media.