Surviving in a World of FaceCraft
Triggered by Jon Lund’s latest blogpost, “Facebook killed the blog” – and also discussions at the New Media Days brainstorm the other day – I came to wonder: Is Facebook really suffocating all other web services? Have the majority of internet users been lulled into satisfaction by The Facebook Choir’s rendition of “Nobody does it better”?
Jon Lund and his Google search results point to the fact that some people now find they spend less time blogging, because they’re busy with Facebook. Others, for instance Morten Remmer, find that the microblogging trend (Twitter, Jaiku etc.) also has little to offer in view of Facebook’s status wall. So is Facebook the only personal, output channel we need? And how long before Mr. Zuckerberg launches World of Facecraft to quell the advances of online gaming too?
Few would disagree that the blog as a communication platform has lost its overall news value during the past 2-3 years, but measuring up a coffin seems a bit rash. When weblogs started to gain popularity in the late 90s it was because the platform offered an easy-to-use interface for sharing opinions. Since then multiple formats of personal, online expression have emerged to compete for the user’s attention and some of these certainly fit a broader portion of web users better than the blog ever did.
Facebook is a unique example of this change; a university experiment becoming an indispensable, worldwide hub of services bridging microblogging (Status wall), webmail (Inbox), calendar (Events), pictures (Photos), commercial websites (Pages), casual gaming (Applications) not to mention personal details on every person, you want to stay in touch with (Friends.)
Facebook’s nose for market direction + guts to revitalize their product in spite of customer satisfaction is deserving of respect. Most people now get their need for online expression satisfied right within one URL. Facebook is the mall of social web apps. Who would ask for anything more?
Eventually most of us will. Parking our online attention with Facebook is easy and comforting in a fragmented media landscape, but special interest content and services we’ll look for outside; in the rough. I love the status feed, but don’t count on it for the well-argued opinions or detailed research that I find in some blog posts. I often flick through photos of my Facebook friends, but go to Flickr or Google when searching for specific motifs. Facebook is a convenient constellation of services, but every one is done better elsewhere.
Take Twitter. (In my view Twitter (“What are you doing?”) should switch catchphrase with FB (“What’s on your mind?”) and make both fit better.) If I want nice-to-know information about my friends’ whereabouts or concerns, I consult Facebook. If I want to stay on top of news from around the world, I go to Twitter – or actually Twitter runs on my desktop all the time; a constant flow of (mostly) relevant news that I wouldn’t want to be without.
The nature of your Twitter flow is also fully customizable. It simply depends on whom you choose to follow. I only have a handful of duplicates from my Facebook friends list on Twitter and consequently get two very different feeds: One work related (Twitter) and one personal (FB). I think Twitter does microblogging better than Facebook, but at the end of the day I would like to have them both, as they fill different needs.
All in all it’s great that Facebook is taking some steam off the blogosphere and the twittersphere; fragmentation in this respect is not a bad thing and will hopefully lead to blogs regaining some lost authority, while Twitter continues to provide for a different kind of public sphere communication – as opposed to personal.
This is not arguing for an elitist quality-purification of blogs, tweets and other non-FB services, but simply saying that perhaps the Facebook Monster isn’t so much killing off other services as helping them crystallize their strengths – like Myspace is now synonymous with music.
Is this naïve and overly simplistic? Or perhaps just stating the obvious?
Related:
New Media Blog: Lifestreaming – Connecting the social dots
The Bivings Report: Facebook’s Challenges in Going Global
5 Responses to “Surviving in a World of FaceCraft”
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I agree with a lot of this, but I see Facebook as something else than a web service. I see Facebook as nothing less than Web 4.0.
What Facebook does (in addition to the things you have mentioned) is take the one thing out of web 2.0 that made it hard to take seriously; Anonymity.
On Facebook, people are themselves with their own names and even pictures, and that means that a) people think more about what they say and do and b) the Facebook experience is much more personal.
Many blogs are still anonymous, and the brevity of Tweets makes them less personal. On Facebook, people’s opinions and actions are shared on a basis of trust.
Furthermore, the jungle of web services is very hard to find your way around in, and Facebook collects all the basic services that ordinary users need in one place.
Facebook is what MySpace never became, and the people that say that Twitter or Jaiku or FriendFeed is the new Facebook don’t know what they’re talking about.
look at how played the facebook games are:
petsociety mmo’en had 6 million players,
World of warcraft (counting only EU and US) had only 4.5 million.
Considering facebook only has a 6.6 % share in Aisia I think it’s fair to assume that Facebook games already is there?
Acclaim knows this: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19136
Activision know this: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/30332/Kotick-Facebook-is-a-threat-to-games
Actually I am doing a lot of research on Asia – more specifically South Korea, and I find the complete opposite trend here – that instead of people flocking to a SNS – they are actually starting to move their activities elsewhere and predominatly to blogs. The blogs here are often a mix of personal and topic based content and often they are not made public but are only know to a selected group of friends. They maintain their SNS profile, but uses it only for personal “light” stuff – much like you describe. I hope you will include the asian trends againg this year!
@Vinh – I’m saving the Web 4.0 label for a rainy day, but it’s quite clear that SNS are influencing the very cultures of online communication. The developing issues surrounding identity and trust are some of the most interesting to follow.
The Facebook Connect service – and Facebook joining the OpenID Foundation – are exciting signs that FB aims to be a significant driver of cross-service identity authentification.
@Bo – Thanks for contributing w/these great references! Apparently FB’s influence on the gaming market is even now more pronounced than I thought.
@Christina – Please keep us updated on your Asia research; it’s definitely a region we should watch closely. South Korea is of course the international first-mover of new media and the trend towards more personal blogging that you mention is in this respect highly interesting: Will the rest of the world follow within 2-3 years? But it also serves to illustrate a huge difference to neighbouring country, China, where they’re having similar discussions about dying blogs vs. proliferating SNS and microblogging. Possibly for different reasons, i.e. censorship. Something I presume is not an issue in South Korea?
Great input, all! I’ve added some more related links to the original post that you may find interesting.
The blog is by no means dead. Henry Jenkins of MIT called this a ‘participatory culture’. I just like to refer to the fact that 18% of online users are content creators, and it is irrelivent whether this is blog, video blog or SNS content, or twitter for that matter. Around 25% of online users are critics, which is what I am doing now. Around 50% are viewers of the content and just read only. In Japan about 50% of the online population read blogs,in Korea it is 60% or more, which is way over newspaper reading