Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”
While strolling around Medium.com, I found this article from @Jeswin titled, “The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back.” It was oddly paired with a cover photo of refugees during the First Balkan War. I laughed at the juxtaposition of teenagers leaving Facebook and refugees during the war. The following are my opinions about Facebook, social media in general and information consumption going forward in the next seven to ten years.
If you didn’t read the article, it can be summed up into this statement:
[In regard to facebook] At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen are irrelevant to me. If I scrolled down I can find 4 stories I actually care about, from a list of about 30. The most important page on Facebook has more than three-fourths of absolutely useless content. – @Jeswin
It can’t be fixed. It’s over.
I would like to begin where @Jeswin left off – “It can’t be fixed. It’s over.” Like any great empire, Facebook will have a rise and a fall. So, when does it fall? Or does it? The interesting fact about Facebook is that it already owns 1 out of every 7 people on the planet. Everyone’s “stuff” is already on Facebook – family photos, 7th grade status updates, and high school reunion groups. This would lead us to believe that Facebook is too big to fail. But sadly, that is not the case. Within the next seven years, a new disruptive force will come along and redefine the way we connect with each other.
Moore’s Law of Sharing
I think almost everyone interested in technology knows about Moore’s Law – the famed statement that computer power doubles every two(ish) years. Most recently in an interview with Wired, Zuckerberg applied Moore’s Law to sharing things on the web:
“Three years from now, people are going to be sharing 8 to 10 times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.” – Mark Zuckerberg
Whether Facebook becomes the means by which we share this data or not, the preferred social network of the 2010's will need to handle a lot of data. And according to Zuck, that’s 8 to 10 times more data than today. I imagine it is a bit scary for Zuck to wake up and wonder whether Facebook will still be around when we are sharing hundreds of things per week. According to @Jeswin, Facebook won’t be it.
The problem is sharing. It is the most fundamental feature of Facebook, and it’s completely broken. Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. – @Jeswin
Why Twitter is closer to the future than Facebook
In 2006, an unassuming microblogging service rose to become one of the most preferred networks to the day. It’s name was Twitter, hatched out of the podcasting company of Odeo. Its 140 character simplicity made sharing “what you’re doing” even easier and effectively lowered the attention span of humanity to a few sentences.
The fact of the matter is that Twitter is more powerful, more engaging, and simpler than Facebook could ever be.
On Twitter, it feels like there is more data is shared per user per second than any other social network. This means that a person can share every moment of their life. But the problem with Twitter is that quality of content has degraded. This echoes a lot of the sentiments of @Ev when he created Medium.com.
“Even though you can be a one person media outlet, we need to raise the quality of what is produced.”
The main purpose of any social network is to realize how the world connects. The more connections we make, the faster humanity moves forward. That’s the idea behind Twitter, Facebook, and every other network out there. If we can connect to another person we may never see in the real world through “#” or “@” then the world is immediately a better place.
What’s next?
With all this new data we are going to be sharing within the next ten years, the “next” Facebook sounds a lot like the news reading aggregator Summly that was recently purchased by Yahoo for $30M. Although Summly is only a news aggregator, imagine if its technology was combined with the technology of Twitter and Medium.
The internet is great at giving us access to tons of information, but it’s also easy to waste a bunch of time sorting through it all. A lot of the tools that put your information all in one place rely on titles to help you understand. But you know how helpful those can be. So all this stuff that is supposed to give you information faster can actually slow you down. You need a tool that provides a summary of a site’s content, so you can quickly decide if it’s something you want to read. No more aimless clicking. – Summly video
P.S. – leave a note, this is my first medium article. I’d love to hear feedback. Read my other article: Can an organized social network exist?
