Is facebook on the wane?

[Dr Lobster*]

Of course you can, Gavin! I warn you though, I never update my status (well, hardly ever).

Anyway, I saw this on my feed today. warms your cockles doesn't it?

[Gavin Scott]

Yay!

I'm tempted to also like cuddles.

[Alexia]

Oh god.

There's a black and white picture of the Titanic in Southampton dock going round Failbook at the moment, tagged with the following verse:

"The Titanic hit the iceburg 100 years ago. Share this pic to show respect for the people who died."

I despair.

[Nick Harvey]

"Like".

Alexia's post, that is.

[WillPS]

Oh god.

There's a black and white picture of the Titanic in Southampton dock going round Failbook at the moment, tagged with the following verse:

"The Titanic hit the iceburg 100 years ago. Share this pic to show respect for the people who died."

I despair.

dat is well wespectful

[Alexia]

Innit just.

[woah]

Speaking of being disrespectful, I keep coming across stuff like this on my Facebook:



I find it really disgusting that people post stuff like this - because it's clear they don't really care about the injuries of the person in the picture, they do it to earn themselves some attention and likes on the photo to satisfy their enormous egos. This person has actually asked for people to subscribe to them on the photo!

I'm also fairly sure this person would rather keep to themselves after such terrible injuries, instead of having their face plastered all over social networking sites.

I also find it odd that people are inclined to like these photos to 'prove their respect' - I'm pretty sure we all have plenty of respect for the soldiers that go out there, even if we don't agree with the fact that they are.

[Alexia]

Someone else on here mentioned it - "liking", and "sharing" and "post this as your status if..." are all ways that the iTunes generation can "do" stuff without actually doing anything. Why bother donating to charity when you can turn a few pixels on a webpage blue?

They're also a convenient way of promoting hostility and division - if you DON'T post the latest fads as your status you don't support the troops, you don't care about breast cancer, you don't want to save the Earth, and you get chastised and ostracised for it. And it's not one-on-one bullying and mental torture like it is in the playground. This gets shared with 100s or 1000s of people, depending on circles of friends.

If Facebook wasn't the default way of keeping in contact with friends and family nowadays (it's even replaced SMS messaging in some of my circle) I wouldn't stick around, but it's a case of better the devil you know. It's like shopping in Tesco's - you feel dirty and cheap and exploited doing it but where else are you going to go?

[Dr Lobster*]

Its been almost a year since I started this thread.

I'd say the amount which is getting posted is slowing down further.

Is Facebook just a fad that's slowly dying out?

Now some of this decline might be down to the fact that as everyone gets older, settled down they have less time or just don't feel the need to tell the world when they go out on the lash.

But is it more than me and my peers getting older, are people getting bored of it?

I find I'm checking my feed less, and I also find the sponsored statuses and adverts which appear in the mobile view very annoying and tedious - I seem to get the same half dozen constantly.

What about you?

[bilky asko]

I find that the tedious posts have gone from Facebook, but have been replaced by diatribes. I think the hour-by-hour stuff has been excised to Twitter.

Personally, I find I'm using it less, but only because I now have unlimited texts and I can keep in regular contact with certain people by texts alone. However, group communication is only really possible on Facebook, and I'm using it for that more and more.

I think Facebook is morphing from what it used to be. Don't forget that it was only a few years ago that Facebook was full of spam notifications from games and was still a foreign concept to many.

[lukey]

Its been almost a year since I started this thread.

I'd say the amount which is getting posted is slowing down further.

Is Facebook just a fad that's slowly dying out?

Now some of this decline might be down to the fact that as everyone gets older, settled down they have less time or just don't feel the need to tell the world when they go out on the lash.

But is it more than me and my peers getting older, are people getting bored of it?

I certainly think it's being used differently, but I'm not sure whether it's waning. Status updates, for example, may well be declining - maybe it was always destined to be a bit of a fad, or it's just been supplanted by things built around that (ie. Twitter). As I think was mentioned earlier in the thread, when people start having to manage identities across lots of services with overlapping functionality, it's understandable more people will either take a lowest common denominator approach and just cross-spam their posts from one service to the other, or give up entirely on one. Where Facebook still seems to be growing is photos (especially from phones) and API guff. Perhaps where once somebody would talk about what movie they're watching, they rely on Facebook/Netflix to announce it on their behalf, god only knows why....

That's why I'm not sure I'd agree Facebook as a whole can be considered a fad. It so desperately tries to weave itself into everything, even as individual features peak and trough in popularity, it'll still manage to hang about for a good while, sort of like a recurring wart.

I find I'm checking my feed less, and I also find the sponsored statuses and adverts which appear in the mobile view very annoying and tedious - I seem to get the same half dozen constantly.

I agree with this, and Facebook.com is getting particularly grim for this. I assume more people are exclusively using their mobile apps now, which they've so far been slow to monetise on. The reaction therefore seems to be to go for an all-out ads blitz on Facebook.com, but urgh. Below is an example I captured a couple of weeks ago, which stood out because despite the density of *stuff* on the page, not a single thing actually related to what somebody was saying, or doing, or even just taking photos of. There will be a tipping point where people get fed up of being unwittingly sold as ambassadors for brands they 'liked' at some point in the past, particularly when the social value Facebook generates fails to match the contempt shite like this summons up...