ON A LITTLE FACEBOOK FATIGUE

QUESTION TIME

This commentary by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC News, on Facebook's recently  declining growth rate in the UK, had me nodding a bit in agreement:

"Facebook - it's so over. That's been the tenor of most of the commentary since Thursday's figures showing a slight dip in Facebook's UK users.

The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening.

I think the opposite is true - that Facebook's new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids."

The metaphoric nodding got more vigorous when it came to this bit:

"...by then I was already finding that many of my wrinklier Facebook friends had tired of the ceaseless vampire-biting, hugging, poking and other daft aspects of the increasingly cluttered and annoying site.

Their status updates started to say "...falling out of love with Facebook" and then they disappeared altogether."

Separately, TechCrunch has a post on how Facebook's U.S. metrics are leveling off as well.

And although we can all point to anecdotal evidence that suggests that some of us may have gotten tired enough of Facebook that we're visiting and using it less, the long-term potential utility of a service like Facebook keeps us interested enough to check back every now and then.

We all likely have a list of features that we'd love to see on Facebook, that if implemented, may get us back to using the service a little bit more, perhaps with the same level of excitement we all felt when we first encountered the service.

But it's tough to implement features at the same pace when the service has been growing at the rate it has to date around the world, and still keep everything ticking just right.  This gap between Facebook's promise and it's potential is something I've talked about before.

And even when Facebook does implement a wished for feature, like the ability to group friends, for instance, the implementation may sometimes leave us wishing for more.

So a little Facebook fatigue is not a bad thing, nor unexpected.  As long as the service comes back and manages to surprise and delight us again, even if for just one more time.

Comments

[McLarty]

So which one do you see taking over, tumblr, twitter? or something else?

By the way, I recently added you to twitter: (I'm jmclarty). I stop by your blog every now and again...pretty interesting stuff. Just thought I should stop being a blog voyeur, and join the convo.