We all love Facebook or loved may be or you never did? Facebook has an interesting profile of members. Members who always complain about any little change Facebook does to their user interface. There is unanimous decision by Facebook's members that the change is bad and go on and on about how it moved this here and how it move that there! But guess what? They complained on Facebook? The complained on the place with the problem. I assume that when you have a problem on one platform, you move to another platform, an alternative, and speak your heart out about how what you moved from was that bad! So we can say may be they did not really have alternatives at that time. Thinking about it, many users of Facebook actually migrated from Hi5, MySpace and others and of course, there's no going back. But one question to ask is, would these users move if they were presented with another alternative at that time? Short answer, No! What keeps people on Facebook is not their interface per say. It's the fact that you meet your friends (your real world friends) there. Of course, if you do a quick Google/Bing search right now, you would find other unexplored social networking site with great user interfaces and interesting feature sets. You are not using those because your friends are not there. Facebook has your buddies there talking about all the trivia there is to talk about, view the pictures of the events you attended with your buddies etc. With the kind success Facebook has, it is logical to think other people would take the decision to build their own social networks and find a way to woo members there. And yeah, others tried! Tried really hard. Google+? The upcoming of Google+ was code-named, the Facebook killer. We've heard of other aspiring Facebook killers, Twitter? Well, while people find Twitter to be a viable replacement for Facebook, I think otherwise. Twitter and Facebook provide two distinct experiences for the user. On one hand, users are in this environment where they need to be heard by the respective audience concerning something they have "pledged" to talk about in a small but intelligent and concise manner.(Twitter) And there's another experience where the user is in their friends locality virtually and just talking about things only them can make sense of. (Facebook)
Facebook recently, bought Oculus Rift, bought Whatsapp and couple of other cool tech companies. You ask why? Good Question! When they bought Oculus Rift, I tried to figure out what could facebook (A social network) make out of Virtual Reality! Then ... wait for it ... Virtual Social Gaming. Now, not only do you get to chat with buddies in difference spaces, you get to bridge the spatial difference with virtual reality and add more value to the social experience you already have. Now remember this is just a projection of they might use the VR headset for. May be they may reverse engineer it to serve another purpose. The tech world is super dynamic and you must be open to surprises at any time. Then they bought Whatsapp which was met with a lot of mixed feelings about privacy and such considering the Snowden case and all. I heard people vowing not to use Whatsapp, saw people actively switching to Telegram. It seemed to me that Telegram came at the right time. However from what I have seen, the numbers have not changed. The number of active users of Whatsapp may have reduced slightly, but it did not make Telegram any bigger. Telegram enticed users with end to end encryption allowing you to have super secretive chats etc. But what happened? In my next post, I will delve into the battle of Whatsapp and Telegram and why Telegram does not seem to be winning.
So the big question. Is Facebook falling? Looking at all these current tech take-overs by Facebook, it is obvious, they do not want to go down so easily. On the general look things, a lot a users seem to have lost interest in Facebook. The number of active users seem to have decreased over the years and here is why. Mobile. With the advent of mobile apps & technologies, people stay longer on their phones than on their PC. You might say ... Hey Facebook has a mobile app. But lets face it. The user experience you get on the Facebook PC version is totally different from the mobile app version. The mobile app version seems to be very sluggish to me as compared to the Twitter app on my mobile device. Twitter has probably gained more grounds when it comes mobile usage as compared to Facebook. So it is hard to project what Facebook will make of companies they have in their "possession", but as a tech enthusiast, I am hoping they cook up something very very cool.
