Facebook stats dip? Oh noes!

Surfing the top of TechMeme right now (yes, Scoble, I read it too) is a post from Om about new Comscore stats showing a dip in Facebook traffic for the month of September.

Here’s one of the graphs from Om’s post:

Let me preface this by saying that I’m the guy who never uses 1 and 10 on a scale from one to ten. I’m not usually prone to extremes.

I think we’re going from 10 to 1 on Facebook here. All you have to do is read Om’s post, Scoble’s post, and to a certain extent Joshua’s post to see some of this “OMG Facebook explain yourself!!!” sentiment.

Let’s avoid the swing from “Facebook is the best thing ever,” to “Facebook traffic dipped, it’s dead.” Because the truth is that neither statement is accurate.

At the Web Community Forum we’ve got a panel for Facebook Curmudgeons. There are things about Facebook that could be better, but unlike a piece of software form the mid 90’s, it is a fluid product. By this I mean that you never really have “version 1,” “version 2,” and so on. Facebook is constantly changing and adapting platform, and next month it won’t be exactly the same place to build your business or promote your business that it was last month.

Let’s go through a quick list of possible reasons for a traffic dip:

1. Facebook’s feature set this month was different
2. People went on fewer vacations, and uploaded fewer pictures
3. College students went back to school, had more homework and more network problems
4. Facebook had fewer server problems, and fewer people came back because their pages didn’t load
5. People are temporarily bored with Facebook, or, of course,
6. People are losing interest in Facebook permanently

Frankly I suspect there are hundreds of other possible reasons as well. Given the fact that Facebook keeps doing interesting things, and the developers on Facebook keep doing interesting things, I think it’s a bit early to call it quits on the platform.

Maybe we’ve sprung a leak, but let’s patch the hole, not abandon ship.

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