Strong words against Facebook come from Matt Frye over at O’Reilly OnLamp:
There’s a lot of speculation at any given time about what the future of the web is. I don’t know what it is, but I think I know what it’s not. Facebook.
Yeah, yeah, I can hearing the booing from here. Easy now, fan boys.
The truth is that the web rides waves of innovation and everyone on of those waves has a trough between it and the next wave. Facebook is currently experiencing the slide down the backside of the wave and is headed into the trough. Why?
Matt is right that things tend to work in cycles, and Facebook might be strolling down the backside of their upward surge, but I think Matt’s reasoning is a little off. The five point he lists to explain why FB is on its way out are something like: Facebook is getting tons of new users and traffic (but MySpace is the cap of possible users), Facebook costs money to run and isn’t selling, Facebook is pissing off users, Facebook is getting sued, and Facebook sucks.
Number five is completely subjective. And given the value that so many people are getting from it, I’d say it’s hard to argue that it’s useless.
Numbers, four, two, and one are the same thing: money. Matt seems to discount the possibility that Facebook will be making money on its own, and might not need new investment money to move forward.
And number three? It might be true that FB is pissing off some of its users with privacy issues. But they are responding, and they have done this before. They’re still (insert Matt’s point one). So far, so good. I think Facebook is still doing alright.
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