Business - Written by Don Tapscott on Thursday, December 6, 2007 13:04 - 4 Comments

Don Tapscott
The Future of Facebook

Istanbul: Pundits these days tout the impending demise of Facebook. But sitting here getting ready to address an audience of over 1,000 Turkish marketing managers I’m being shown some data. Facebook is the 5th most popular place on the web in the US. But in Turkey it’s number 2. Everywhere I go in Europe Facebook is exploding. (Alexa says Facebook is the number 1 site in Canada)

At the recent web 2.0 conference in Berlin I asked who’s on Facebook and of hundreds in the audience I could count just a few who didn’t put up their hands. True this is anecdotal evidence, but as Dylan says “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The pundits don’t like Facebook because the company ignores them. They have lousy public relations and it’s tough to get through to anyone in management. Further they make blunders like Beacon only to backtrack with profuse apologies. More “cult of the amateur I guess.”

Trouble is they continue to grow. And there is no evidence that their actual customers are moving elsewhere.

The reason? Think about your own Facebook. Where else would you go and still be able to communicate with your friends. And think about how prohibitive the costs would be for you to re-organize your digital social life somewhere else. Facebook is the Internet analogy to the phone system. Nobody is going to create another phone system in the near future.

Moreover, the fact that 50,000 Facebook members organized to change it’s policy on Beacon is, as they say in software, a feature not a bug. That’s what real dynamic communities do.

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4 Comments

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Joshua Beil
Dec 6, 2007 14:18

The rumors of Facebook’s demise due to the botched Beacon rollout are greatly exaggerated. That said, this is a very compelling analysis on the hype/overvaluation that is surrounding Facebook.
http://mashable.com/2007/12/03/facebook-15-billion/

DH
Dec 6, 2007 17:55

Remember Friendster?

Niraj J
Dec 6, 2007 18:54

an interesting thing about stickiness on the internet is that it is either very tight and keeps on attracting more and more very fast and erodes also very fast. There is a Core Critical Mass that carries the stickiness around.

My story: In 1998 ,99 : I was stuck to hotmail , practically everyone I knew had a hotmail account. then came the Microsoft acquisition , MSFT wanted to move the windows and screwed up on user experience. I held on to my account like my phone number. Saw some improvement in yahoo mail , but still held on to my account.

then came gmail. Started realizing that all my friends had started moving to gmail , I was probably one of the last ones to move to gmail. Realized that gmail eroded the stickiness to other providers very very quickly – faster than I could have imagined.

Niraj J
Dec 6, 2007 18:56

Missed out a line above.

Does my story sound similar to what is happening with facebook now?

Lets see what happens with Open Social and does it drastically change nature of communities.

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