Comment: Facebook's not the new Google

 

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Posted on 20 Aug 2007 at 15:46

Have you been poked yet? I've been poked about 30 times in the past month: five times by my girlfriend, but more surprisingly by former colleagues, old school friends and several people I've never laid eyes on.

Before you cancel your PC Pro subscription or call the vice squad, it's all perfectly innocent. I've succumbed to the social-networking site of the moment: Facebook (poke being its desperately grating term for alerting others to your presence).

I usually give social networks a wider berth than the megaphone-toting preacher on Oxford Street. But not since the glory days of Friends Reunited have I witnessed a site that has hooked the vast majority of my friends, family and colleagues. Not until the "friend invitation" arrives from my Dad will I accept that Facebook has become totally mainstream, but with the site reportedly attracting 150,000 new users daily, that moment can't be far off.

Yet, while Facebook undoubtedly has momentum, it hasn't got the one thing every single social-networking site has so far failed to achieve: longevity. Friends Reunited - once the multimillion pound poster child of the social-networking generation - is now little more than an online time capsule from 2001, with swathes of profiles that haven't been updated in years. The site recently sponsored a TV programme on ITV (Friends Reunited's parent company), about a woman who came out of a coma after 18 years. I'll be amazed if Friends Reunited comes back to life that quickly.

MySpace deserters

It isn't just comparative dinosaurs such as Friends Reunited that have problems with their sell-by date. Only recently, Rupert Murdoch was being lauded for rediscovering his touch by lavishing $580m on MySpace. Now, even that's beginning to look vulnerable. Asked if he was worried about readers abandoning his newspapers for MySpace, Murdoch shot back: "I wish they were. They're all going to Facebook at the moment."

Murdoch's put his finger on the underlying problem with social-networking sites: they don't actually do anything. We do all the work for them. When users start migrating to rival sites they can't retain people by offering new features or extra storage, because that wasn't what tempted people to them in the first place. They were pulled in through fear of social exclusion. But once all your friends stop updating their profiles, sending messages or uploading pictures, the social networking site is nothing but a hollow shell.

So has Facebook found an answer to this problem? It thinks it has. The company opened up its APIs so that anyone could write applications for Facebook and add them to their profile. In theory, this sounds like a credible way of keeping eyeballs fixed on the site, turning Facebook into a portal of various apps and services.

But have you seen which apps are most popular on the site? Now, instead of merely poking someone, you can "super poke" them. Or, instead of writing on their wall, you can "graffiti" it, or perhaps give your best friend a Zombie bite. All pointless fun for about five-and-a-half seconds, but nothing that a 12-year-old wouldn't rapidly tire of.

I've yet to come across a single extra that I can even be bothered to install, let alone anything vaguely resembling a killer app.
Yet Facebook seems intent on heading down this path. It recently purchased Parakey, a company that claims to be developing a "web operating system that can do everything an OS can do". Immediately, Facebook was being heralded as the next Microsoft or Google, even though both those companies - especially Google - already have a sophisticated family of web applications. Parakey's site isn't even open for business yet.