May 7, 2008

Is Facebook dying?

by Brian Turner

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Jesse Farmer posts what could turn out to be an observation of a tipping point – and decline – for Facebook may be on the cards.

In The State of the Facebook Platform Jesse charts the growth of Facebook application development, and comes to the interesting conclusion that development activity is dying.

The observation comes from tracking new signups and post counts from the developer forums, and all show a growth from October last year, but since January there has been a significant decline in activity.

The Active Users per week graph at the top of this coverage helps illustrate this.

The options for explaining this seem to be some or more of the following:

1. Facebook has reached a Tipping Point and is now dying – and like Myspace was a fad for most users who moved to Facebook, they are now flocking to Twitter, until the “next cool thing” arrives. Too dramatic and pessimistic?

2. Development is simply evolving – from a rash of opportunist developments, to a core set of serious development projects. Probably a sane suggestion, but unlikely to explain all data.

3. Development peaked – everything that anyone wanted to be developed has already been developed, so there’s little point in re-inventing the wheel. Probably not realistic considering application potential continues to grow.

Of course, this isn’t simply an idle exploration for its own sake – Facebook is already an internet phenomena and and asset that Microsoft is rumoured to consider buying – though with a potential market value in the region of $15 billion, Bill and Steve better be sure about the growth potential of the sight being realised if bought.

Of course, perhaps the explanation relates in some way to all of the above suggestions – like any phenomena, Facebook has seen a surge of interest which is now calming, as the site settles down to more gradual growth while retaining a strong core user base – pretty much as MySpace has done.

However, as many people will have observed from the internet’s short 15 year history so far, it is a very changeable and volatile medium, where consumer interest – especially for those services which are free – can be fickle indeed.

Is Facebook dying? Probably a far too dramatic statement.

But if Facebook is shrinking, and significantly as a userbase, it’s going to force everyone to re-evaluate the role and long-term value of social media in general.

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Story link: Is Facebook dying?

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