Alex Kellner

Note: Okay, apparently I am still getting used to this regularity thing. Last week was hectic and I didn’t get to post, hopefully I will step it up and get better.

Over the course of the past week or two, I have been thinking about how Facebook has progressed in the past 12 months. This time last year, Facebook was the number one topic discussed in tech circles and was starting to dominate social discourse as well. Since that time, it has stayed in the news with both good PR and bad PR. Yet, among most social networking circles the belief that Facebook has “jumped the shark” is beginning to become more prevalent.

Andrew over at Capitol Valley has a great post reacting to Fake Steve Jobs’ rant:

Then came the Venture Capitalists, and suddenly Facebook was a platform! And it was going to change the world! Revolutionaries in Colombia were using it, and stuff…right…

The truth is, Facebook has jumped the shark. I still keep my profile current, but do I spent much time there? No. Do I use any of the applications? Absolutely not.

Is it a privacy nightmare with dreadful terms of service written by VC’s who want to keep it a walled-garden platform they can sell ads on? Absolutely.

Can I do everything I can do with Facebook with other services, without the hassle or the intrusion or the idiotic problem of people getting their accounts suspended for no apparent reason? Can I do it with more privacy? Yeah. LinkedIn, Drop.io, Flickr, Twitter. ’nuff said.

I agree with Andrew. I spent quite a bit of time on Facebook for a while, but the applications got out of control and Facebook became something it never should have become. Now, I play the occasional game of Scrabble and keep up with friend’s but it become too similar to all of the things I hated about MySpace. There is too much going on, the information I want is too hard to find and I constantly get harassed with Zombie requests (which is perhaps the most annoying thing in the world).

To make matters worse, Facebook had the possibility of becoming a real useful utility for political and issue advocacy causes. However, I think it is becoming less and less likely for any campaign to use Facebook as a major component of their strategy. Instead, to use social networking to one’s advantage, the best option is to create one’s own social network built around the goals of the campaign and/or co-opting a pre-existing niche social network for the cause.

Colin Delaney at e.politics also uses the “jump the shark” metaphor to describe Facebook’s role in online advocacy:

We’ve now seen more than a year of intense use of social networking sites by the U.S. presidential campaigns (and even longer use by issue-advocacy groups), which gives us a solid base of information and experience to judge just how effective Facebook is as a political tool — both for organized political campaigns and advocacy groups and for individual political activists. The verdict? Facebook has not lived up to a lot of its initial political hype, and for reasons that are perfectly natural considering what kind of a site it is.

Facebook isn’t going away and politicians & issue advocacy groups aren’t going to stop using the site. However, I don’t see Facebook as the savior of the Internet and it certainly won’t be the place where campaigns see success in fostering and mobilizing an online audience.