I was talking with a friend of mine today, (Yes, I do have friends IRL!) and he was talking to me about Facebook. Namely, that when he came to Canada on exchange (from Mexico, to avoid the current increases in political turmoil), he changed his name on Facebook, so that less people would be able to find him / try to scam him.
While the topic matter in that discussion was rather bleak, it ties in nicely to what I had been planning to write about – namely, whether we need Facebook anymore.
Now, I’m a pretty new convert to Facebook (member for a bit over 2 years, which is substantially less than a majority of my peers), but I’m pretty addicted to it, (despite the changes to layout that made it difficult to navigate...).
So, imagine my dismay to hear that everyone thinks that Facebook is dying. Part of the issue may be that it has grown too big, much like Myspace had before it, but the main reason for all of this talk is Facebook’s spotty financial record. Many people invested in Facebook, under the assumption that it was a profitable through advertising means. Unfortunately, it is not. Despite Facebook’s (theoretical) new methods of generating income, a lot of industry analysts have decided to just let it go and move on to the next big thing.
Twitter, meet the corporate world.
Twitter has allure, sure; at the same time, nobody has really figured out how to make money on Twitter, (though though not from a lack of trying). It’s just like with Facebook – everyone rushing to the next big thing, without realizing that turning a social media tool into a profit tool is very difficult.
As a profit model, Twitter would worry me. I’ve talked earlier about how Twitter difficult to regulate, and frankly, the direction necessary to make it quote/unquote "profitable" is the same direction that Facebook just took.
Doomed to failure.
Twitter is a global network, like Facebook, and it’s sole purpose is to keep you updated on all your friends, in a way that is as stalker-ish as possible without actually stalking. If it becomes another corporate tool, it loses a lot of its appeal, and, like Facebook, I think that complaints about spamming would start – maybe slowly at first, but definitely starting.
The war between corporate interests and the social community’s has already begun on Twitter, with services like TweetTornado looking as if they’ll destroy the current fun climate on Twitter, (though, a lot of corporate bigwigs already have got Twitter accounts). This makes me wary... should I go sign up for Twitter now, and hop on before the wave gets too big? Or do I just wait it out, and wait for the big companies to ruin it, (like they invariably will, because when they start making a concentrated – read: oversaturated – marketing effort, they’ll keep taking and taking too much of a good thing, and it’ll collapse), and try to discover what the next big thing is?
I think some people were expecting this sort of thing to happen, though – much like when the internet first started and people would register domain names of big companies, Twitter’s got its fair share of squatters, willing to sell companies names back to them at inflated prices. Frankly, it’s a smart strategy, (one I wish I had thought of), but it’s risky, (since the big corporations will litigate, and are perfectly happy to bankrupt their opponent through legal fees).
But maybe, just maybe, Twitter won’t be overrun, and won’t die. Maybe Facebook won’t either. Even if sometimes, you think think it should. Maybe the corporations will see that it the money-making possibilities aren’t so extreme, and instead of trying to flood the social media sites with their bad ads, come up with new, innovative, (and most of all, less intrusive / annoying) methods of marketing, and learn to co-exist instead of co-opt. Corporations have their own version of Twitter, anyways... they just had to look, and maybe, just maybe, listen to what the online community has to say.
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