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Sunday, November 20, 2011

is Facebook decaying ?

An interesting article by CNET's Molly Wood criticizes the new news sharing model of Facebook. As it happens frequently, the dialogue which developed in the talkback section is just as interesting and enlightening as the article itself.

Naturally, one cannot make serious conclusions based on public opinion as expressed in talkbacks, because you cannot get a reliable statistical sample. But just like other forms of opinion polls, that article and the people who felt a need to respond to it, mostly in a supportive manner, appear to wave a very important flag for Facebook: news feeds are become over loaded with irrelevant information and digital clatter. It appears that the same steps which were intended to get a maximum output from the Social Graph, might threaten the integrity of the social network.

Facebook has displayed so far an impressive flexibility and adaptability,  but once again, just like regarding privacy, a clear conflict of interests arises. While Facebook aspires for heavily-loaded news feeds, Users aspire for interesting and meaningful news feeds. A gentle balance has to be maintained, and as Facebook's IPO may be coming nearer, it might be that the pressure to display a nice financial display will make that balance impossible to keep.

But lets not be overly critical here. Facebook is in a sense one of the greatest scientific experiments going on nowadays. It might be a long term phenomena, just as computing. It might be a short term phenomena, Just like its predecessor, myspace (still alive, still declining). No one can really tell what is the best strategy for the creature called the-largest-social-network-ever, until after such a strategy has been tried and tested.

Time will tell... 

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