Are we done with sharing? Tired of posting? Annoyed with too much information? Has Facebook become less valuable and thus we are starting to turn it off? "News hit the other day that Facebook may have lost about six million users in the U.S. in one month, according to Inside Facebook, a site that analyzes the social network for developers and marketers." With a US base at about 150 million, that is about a 4% decline in one month. But is it a fluke or a trend?
It doesn't seem too easy to delete an account and far easy to simply stop using it. And one month does not a trend make. More interesting would be to get deeper analytics from users to see if they are using it more or less. A US decline in usage may back up the assumption that Facebook is waning. The article suggests a few reasons, from seasonal adjustments to privacy controls, though I doubt either really matter to most.
For me, Facebook still remains relevant as the place to go to catch up on friends and family activities through posts and pictures. In fact, I prefer posting kid pictures on Facebook as opposed to e-mailing them; yet I still do both. But Twitter has become more relevant in comparison simply to get quick gossip and news on the fly. Is Facebook in trouble? Today I don't believe it is replaceable by Twitter nor is there anything on the horizon that offers something better. But I have no doubt that this news may be the impetus for another entrepreneur to find a better mousetrap to take over the social networking landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment