Facebook feels like it has gone from 'site you had heard was like MySpace but big with US college students' to 'site that is going to take over the world' in the space of what feels like about 5 months. Compete (here) shows that its US user base has grown by 124% compared with MySpace's more leisurely 24% growth since last July. In the UK growth has been much faster with it moving from zero to everyone you know now on it. On top of that valuations of $6 billion are being talked about and Facebook is now being talked off as the next big platform (even if that has strange echos of Netscape for some).
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Here's my take: This is the top. Facebook has grown massively as the late 20s and 30s age group suddenly 'got' social networking. In mass the early majority has now put up their basic profile and uploaded a picture. They have linked to their friends, poked and written on someones wall. Over the following few months I have had a steady stream of friend requests which they have accepted in a social form of stamp collecting. Some of my friends have produced a huge amount of content, updated their profile, added photos, send out applications that serve no purpose etc. Now however the number of friend requests has reduced to a tricle. I've also noticed that people aren't just as active as they were before. We're glad our stuff is up their but we just don't visit it as often as we did before.
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This all feels very ominiously like FriendsReunited which in 2000 became a media sensation, everyone joined up, updated their details about where they where now. Emailed a few old lost friends. Checked for updates for a while and then gradually got back to their old lives. MySpace feels slightly different in that its younger demographic has more time to produce content and adopt a new way of communicating (noting the decline in use of email by teenagers). For someone who works in an office with Outlook open all day, is Facebook really better than email for dropping a note to your friends?
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Which brings us to Facebook as a platform. Apart from iLike, Facebook apps have been roundly condemned as pretty pointless (zombie chomp anyone?). However there has been an implicit assumption that they will get better. Will they? What is the consumer crying out for here? Or are there just lots of consumer app companies desperate to get in front of Facebook's millions of users? Interestingly, as the number of friend requests from Facebook has slowed down, the number of requests from LinkedIn has stayed fairly steady. LinkedIn fits a genuine user need (having moved companies 5 times in 8 years its great to have all my contacts in one place and I've found it really useful a number of times).
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My prediction: Facebook will continue to inflate as it moves from early majority to late majority but the core will hollow out. The new apps won't be that much more compelling than the current ones. $6 billion will be the high point of valuation.
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