I got off Facebook permanently this week. Ahem. I thought it'll be fun to disconnect with some flare and therefore, I created an event inviting people to delete their accounts along with me on a given day. About 4% said yes and another 2% said may be. I don't know who finally did but it was an interesting experiment that demoed that there were people who had had enough.
Back in 2007 with a prod from my chaddi dost Ram Papatla, I envisioned a world of mega platforms - such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft - converging Social and Business Collaboration, Telecom and Internet Connectivity and Do-It-Yourself and Architecture Computing. This model was published in the book New Age of Innovation (by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan) in 2008. Today, everyone has entered everyone else's bedrooms and Google, Apple, Amazon have become these mega platforms. Yahoo! is busy fixing household issues and Microsoft seems to be figuring things out now.
Today, I see a different world where Facebook will be the new Yahoo! and or even AOL (which has more interesting acquired businesses such as The Huffington Post and Moviefone than a core business) unless it does things differently. Let's see what this means.
Around but with no meaning
People may not get off Facebook like I did but they will use it more as a login tool, an address book and a photo log - exactly the way they use Yahoo! now. AOL makes $2B in revenues and Yahoo! makes $5B but we can't say that these companies really have sustained impact. (Just fyi, FB makes $3.7B).
Think of the time that we first had a phone connection, an email, a cell phone. What did we do? We got in touch with everybody we knew because we could. My parents still have a brown leather diary that has everyone's phone numbers in it with a few addresses. It's fat with all kinds of other papers and notes in between. It reminds me of FB and its friendly apps.
Social media is for your grandpa
I don't know any of my teenage cousins who use Facebook like they used to. Why? Because all their grandpas are in there (no offense grandpas - my dad is one). When we were kids we used to have our own hangouts that other people never frequented. When they finally did, it became uncool and we eventually found a new dig.
More importantly, the world has changed in the last five years. There has been a grotesque amount of useless content that's been created just because we could. 90% of it makes you barf. What people want is less and less. And once the early adopters who actually make life so cool have moved on, the rest of us will follow.
See Path - a new kind of social/ location mobile network that helps you remember life in a more close-knit way. Or see Pair for just the two of you (you can even thumbkiss - whatever that is). If you want to hangout with a small group of friends then perhaps there's Ourspot. All these are early experiments but it's clear that the shift has occurred.
Design is a niche. Ya, right.
Yes I know you'll say you bought Instagram - it's nice but it's like doing what AOL did by buying The Huffington Post. When Huffington became the first online-only daily to win a Pulitzer - they did, really not AOL. If people know that AOL owned Huffington Post, they would read it less. AOL knows this and therefore you don't see it on the home page.
*
So what should Facebook do now?
Thank its stars for the mega database of people and their lives while it has it and make a dramatic shift in a new direction. Inorganically, it must continue to buy other interesting companies with the money it has and while it has it. These don't need to be in social media. If it buys Whatsapp, which all Blackberry grandpas (again, no offense to grandpas or Blackberry users or both) got on to when they realized that no one's really on BBM anymore. What do you think will happen when FB buys Whatsapp? Exactly what happens when everybody and their cousin shows up at your pool party. FB must buy companies in disconnected areas. While investors would cry hoarse saying it lacks a unified strategy, it would create assets that will keep it safe and less desperate.
FB needs to accept that social media has changed forever and it will never have the run that it has had thus far. It's like being excited that everyone's now got a phone. Ok, get over it - they do and that's that, life moves on. It must stop coercing others to write apps and games on it. They won't. Not so much because, I mean...c'mon, who wants to play Farmville.
Facebook needs to also move in other directions that are different but aligned with its technical and cultural strengths. For example, FB must build augmented intelligence tools to make things more intelligent and connected - a social network of things versus a social network of people. It has the DNA - all it needs is the balls.
*
So what am I using to poke friends now? Email.
