I've been coining this phrase for months to my Facebook friends. There are even some pretty darn hilarious videos poking fun at the idea. And then Facebook (in my opinion) even went as far as to redesign profiles of their users to the "Timeline". Is Facebook the New Myspace?
For me, using Facebook lately has felt more and more like a chore. Today, I was reading an article on TechCrunch about another Facebook-related chore: Users Get a Week To Clean Up Profiles. Alright, man, that's it. I think it would just be easier to delete my Facebook. What are your opinions? I'm sure I will get some diverse responses such as: "All my friends are on Facebook, why should I delete it?", or even as diverse as: "All my friends are on Facebook, why should I delete it?". I know, I just repeated myself - so do people.
Even though I've been saying that Facebook is the new MySpace to my friends for months, when I finally saw Facebook Timeline, it was the icing on the cake. I really am surprised that Facebook is pushing this. Since this is a blog written by me alone (as of this posting), and I don't have a team of Web Developers, etc, this is just for fun and I can just make some predictions. I'm going to predict that Facebook Timeline was a bad idea.
2 comments:
I think the Timeline feature allows just enough customization ability to satisfy creative folks without going to the excesses that MySpace allowed. With Timeline, you're never touching code or HTML, you're just posting some extra data and posting a big picture. I think it's a pretty clever thing and I think most people like it. I also think that despite it being a hit with most people, I think a ton of brands are going to embrace it as well. There's a ton of ways for brands to get more likes, look at how many types of Facebook ad units there are and look at how many companies there are at BuyFacebookFansReviews but there are fewer ways to convert traffic on Facebook into actual sales. I think the Timeline allows them to use the bigger pictures to try and tell a story and that's what will allow them to reach out to people through emotions. I don't think that Facebook is anywhere near MySpace. They're run much more intelligently and despite the criticism that Facebook gets they're set up well for a monster $100 billion+ IPO so I doubt that they're heading in the wrong direction. In fact, if you look at the way that Google is responding to Facebook by pushing Google+ so hard, you'll see where the marketplace is heading.
I definitely agree with you on the majority of your points. To me though, Facebook just has volume - lots of users. I definitely think it's a good idea with what they're doing in not letting users get carried away with code, and flash music players crashing pages, etc.
But like I said, Facebook has volume. Google is better at Ads..admob, and more, in my opinion. As soon as they have more volume, it's hard to say who the big dog will be. It's easy to say Facebook will never die, but people have said things like that in the past and it ended up biting them, kind of like Steve Balmer criticizing the iphone. Do I like the Iphone, no, but it's no doubt a success. But Look how fast Android started to stab at Apple's market share - only took a couple of years.
I'm mainly just guessing for the time being. I can't wait to see what the future has in store for all of the Social Networks. Either way, I think having the choice of Social media alternatives is a very good thing.
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