Do you hear those ‘Sound of Music’ lyrics emanating from the hallowed halls of Socialgraphica sending out our early good-byes to Facebook? The NY Times might be right when it talks about its imminent demise. In an article titled "Facebook Exodus" they refer to things falling apart when the center cannot hold the weight. Is Facebook about to implode at the hands of its own critical mass?
In a previous blog I wrote back in July titled "…this is not your son’s Facebook anymore," I talked about Facebook scaling past the one quarter billion mark, but ironically losing the college kids that made up its original base.
With parents and grandparents now joining in exponential numbers and as Facebook’s demographics skew older, this might be one of the reasons for the exodus of that core group. In this Onion parody, it might also have to do with what your Moms are doing to your digital street cred once they locate you on FB.
According to the NY Times article, the Exodus could also be caused by Zuckerberg et al selling out to commercialism and corporate greed. Virigina Heffernan writes, "As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters" and its desire to compete head-on with Google, the Internet’s numero uno benefactor, "its inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother."
Will Facebook go the way of MySpace, where you can almost hear the tumbleweeds blowing through its ghost town web pages? Has it ‘jumped the shark’ leaving only the marketers left to pick away at is rotting social networking carcass? Is Facebook dying a slow death or have the cool kids just moved on to the next shiny thing?
Or might this be the first red flag to be run up the social media flagpole indicating the end of the Web 2.0 era? If so, when will the hills be alive with the sound of music again, since all the cool kids have left the party and said Adieu to all their old friends?
