Facebook: Rise of the Platform and Death of Social Network
October 2012 1 Billion people on Facebook
1 Billion appears such a small number today after all we hear constantly about the number of transactions processed per second, the funding received by unicorn startups but I think the single biggest achievement of an Internet company to date is to bring one billion people on a single platform, more technically called Social Network.
Birth
Users in America left Myspace, people like me in India dumped Orkut and started using this cool thing called Facebook. I recently graduated out of college and after active social networking on Orkut I joined Facebook where no one had clue about it. People kept status messages, added profile pictures, wrote on friends wall about where to meet after work(may be we were all in a hangover of Orkut) and then suddenly everyone was on Facebook because everyone was on Facebook. Notifications were not grouped then, I remember getting 100 notifications by the time I wake up(different time zones in US and India). I made many friends, juniors and seniors whom I might have met once added me and started liking or commenting on my posts and I thought this was it. No more blogging when I can write Notes, no more chatting on GMail when I can keep in touch with my friends on Facebook.
Adolescence
Facebook grew so much that there were quizzes, apps, games and there was noise everywhere. Average number of friends on Facebook increased and people started understanding privacy. Feed started getting cluttered, there were top stories and recent stories and feed was getting spammed by people who frequently post updates.
Beginning of the death of Social Network
When people are connected a graph is created with users as vertices and their relationships as edges. There was also a big user-likes graph and thus Facebook Graph became this gigantic graph containing users, companies, apps, games, brands, music, movies, restaurants, places and thus it became a platform and the component of Social Network slowly started dying.
Today Facebook is a platform having more than 2.2 billion users empowering them to connect with brands, topics, news and less of networking with other people.
Instagram/Snap Chat are doing the same thing what Facebook did to MySpace
Users want to network their friends, followers and they do it in a place where they think it matters or is seen by relevant people.
But if Facebook has everyone who is relevant to us, then why another social network?
By adding new features and scaling out to accommodate its billion users, Facebook transformed into a Platform and stopped being a place where people network.
Facebook had some problems and instead of using those problems to make it a better social network Facebook used them to become this gigantic platform. The problem with being a platform is you are just a part of audience listening to some one on the dias. People performing is miniscule compared to the audience. It eventually becomes something like twitter or even worse where content published by few is read by many. People become passive participants and content is thrown to them. Once they get bored they will switch to a new platform.
- Facebook killed Home Page Feed
Facebook had a genuine problem.
Problem: It had so much noise on home page.
Solution: Remove noise by limiting number of posts seen by you.
In name of relevancy and targeted feed, Facebook killed the feed. Instead of seeing updates by my friends, I see updates from pages, apps I want to install and updates by my friends on other posts. Facebook narrowed down my world, we get to see only a fraction of our friends updates determined by intelligent algorithms. Instead I see news from websites, trailers, viral videos and more importantly ads. Facebook provides concession by giving me popular updates by my friends like their wedding pics, status updates regarding their success. When audience of your posts decrease, there is no reward for posting something to your network. If your post becomes viral or gets more likes it is because it is lauded by the platform. My dub smash video got more views than the combined number of likes of all my status together because it was shared publicly and people on Facebook watched it. But what if it was not a video and a post which is about my day to day life, it would have reached like 10% of my friends.
2. Death of Wall
Problem: Conversations with group of friends.
Solution: Groups, Group Messaging
There was this certain joy among friends to post on friends wall, inviting comments from friends. Messenger is great and solves many problems like instant communication between friends but that is not the sole reason why the wall died. Facebook killed wall by publishing your posts to your friends. Those private conversations( not exactly private unless people are interested and visit your wall) became public and people entirely stopped posting on friend’s walls.
3. The opposite of Snap Chat
Problem: Facebook posts cannot be searched easily and wall is ordered in a reverse order by time.
Solution: Create a timeline and categorize posts by date, life events
When the teenagers slowly started embracing Snap Chat due to its ephemeral nature, where you need not worry about your pictures being seen at a later time Facebook introduced Timeline where every update could be retrieved within a few steps. Earlier when someone posted an update unless there is a stalker or some one who wants to dig your post it was not common to find your earlier pictures. But Facebook provided tools to search your previous pictures and with Graph Search also the pictures you liked, you were tagged. My privacy is now dependent on the privacy of my friends with whom I am tagged. By making it easier for other people to know about your past updates and recent updates Facebook made sure that unless something is very important, special and safe it will not be on Facebook.
4. Created a legacy continued by new social networks like Instagram
Problem: Number of posts in your feed. People posting frequently can spam your feed.
Solution: Create barriers for posting by having likes.
There is a frequent update problem whether it is a social network or a classifieds page. Unless there is some curation or provide each individual their own domain it is hard to filter noise if everyone posts to a common domain. Facebook likes became a cultural phenomenon where people get feedback on the posts based on the likes the posts get. They tend to post similar pictures or posts which received higher likes. We tend to present to the world a view which is likely to get more acceptance. Trying new things or posting something different is not encouraged unless it becomes viral of some sort. The new age social networks carry the same legacy. Users who thought MySpace wasn’t cool enough and shifted to Facebook are now migrating to Instagram. The initial hoopla about sharing everything on Instagram has already slowly started fading down with people already thinking what to post on Instagram, which of those pictures should I post on Instagram today. Compare this with Snap Chat stories where we add pictures of our day to the story and they are displayed in the order in they are taken instead of reverse order of the time they were taken. The barrier to post a story is less on Snap Chat whereas the probability of posting a story on Facebook or Instagram is very less.
5. Ripple effects seen on partner apps
Problem: Partner apps do not have social networking features
Solution: Provide Facebook authentication on partner apps there by providing your personal information and accessing your friends information.
When Facebook opened its graph, partner apps received huge traffic and Facebook was cluttered with updates. There were privacy concerns everywhere and people got concerned about which apps you can trust. When Yelp started Facebook login, everyone skipped the screen and when Netflix suggested you to share movies with your friends, users were skeptical about the user experience that hardly any one used them.
One one hand people stopped check-ins at a frequent rate( only checking popular places), they even stopped checking on partner sites because of face book's privacy concerns thereby still relying on general public feedback on restaurants, movies.
6. Lists
Problem: Users want to share updates only to specific people
Solution: Create Lists
When an entire social network was based on Circles like Google+ , Facebook conveniently created Lists as a way to share updates with friends. It was not intuitive, cumbersome and finally people stopped using Lists. Automatic Lists are created to view their feed but for sharing automatic lists are still not available.
7. More news, ads, news, ads
Problem: Digital publishers struggling to monetize
Solution: Publish on Facebook
It’s true that 47% of people get their news on Facebook and if the goal is to make it 100% then Facebook is right on the track.
I can go on and on but I want Facebook to stop being a platform and instead become a social network as it was earlier. Else there will never be a social network at all. And that’s my biggest concern.
