While browsing daily social media news, I stumbled upon this article by Judy Shapiro at Ad Age, which poses the question “Has Facebook jumped the shark.” Judy’s main question is if Facebook has gone too far and gained too much of a self-important attitude and will end up frustrating it’s users with all of its features and advertisements. In her words, she wonders if "In Facebook's evolution to become an uber community/marketing/hub platform (with all its consequential complexity), did it dilute its primary, simple value proposition of enabling trusted connections? And in doing so did it risk its future?"
For all of you first generation Facebook users out there, it is pretty incredible to see how far Facebook has come and how much it has changed in just over six years. What makes me doubt Judy’s worries, though, is the fact that every time a new Facebook feature comes out or the site gets slightly redesigned, people tend to be up-in-arms about it for about a few weeks, then quickly come to love it and wonder how they did without it. The author of the article seems to think that by growing in size and features, Facebook will offend it’s users who are there because of the “trusted community” factor which never quite existed on MySpace.
What do you think? In my opinion, Facebook is so big and popular right now that it can almost do no wrong. As long as the original idea behind Facebook is always there, I don’t think it will be negatively affected by adding a lot of new features and becoming more of a tool for marketers. The site is constantly growing, and everything they do seems to work, from the addition of the news feed and status updates, to the creation of Facebook chat.
To me, it seems that the only people who are worried about Facebook offending the “everyday user” who just wants a site to socially connect with trusted friends, are over-thinking journalists or business strategists who think that, at some point, Facebook has to do something wrong. I rarely hear the “everyday user” that they claim to be defending actually complain about the direction that Facebook is going. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, and while we’re on the subject of Facebook, why not stop by our page and check out some of our new deals?
Also, if you’ve seen some strange Facebook status posts by friends this week with numbers referring to people and were wondering what it’s all about, read about it here.
By @StanaMark - follow me on Twitter for more news and blurbs!
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