Tuesday, July 26, 2011 , topic: Tech

Sometimes things in the web are way simpler than we think they are. You don’t have to be a coding guru or an expert designer to understand why some products succeed and others fail. Most of the time it only takes a fast look at a single page to understand the future of a web product. So after a couple of weeks of using Google+ I can easily tell you why facebook is already dead.

I wake up on a random day and log into facebook. I notice that a girl I met once at a bar, posted a picture with her new haircut on her wall. As a natural consequence three single males and some of her female friends rushed to comment on the new haircut. Despite my initial shock I somehow find the guts to move my eyes further down facebook’s homepage. I find out that someone we went to school with, liked a love song video that a girl posted on her wall. To make things more spicy I get to see that some people made some new connections on facebook and finally that two of my friends attended an event, which I know for sure that they did not attend but rather just clicked “yes” on the invitation.

Having seen all of the above, I inevitably have to ask myself:

Who cares ? How will the above information improve my life quality, social relations or at least my web browsing ? Why did I even bother signing up for this crap ?

The right answers are:

People who go on the Internet just to pass their time consuming whatever content. It won’t. Because when it started getting popular everyone was doing it. Also because a better alternative did not exist at the time.

But to be fair, there are some people sharing valuable and interesting information on facebook. And there a few of my fiends that I indeed interact and catch up on chat from time to time. So it’s not a complete waste of time. However if there was a filter that would remove all the useless information from facebook the content would drop down to 10%. And this is the reason why facebook does not create such a filter. Facebook doesn’t aim to provide people with valuable information. Facebook simply wants to provide people with any information and keep them consuming it.

But to many people this is just pain. Having to search through a vast ocean of information I don’t care about, means that the effort is not worth it. Whoever takes this effort out of the way will have me hooked on social networking again. And indeed Google+ removed all the junk out of the way and allowed me to focus on what people are sharing. It also gave me an easy way to filter content with circles. Despite the fact that not all of my friends are on Google+, it takes just a week to understand why it’s so much pleasurable to use that I don’t care.

So will facebook be dead tomorrow ? I don’t think so. The vast majority of people will never switch to Google+. Most of us will “have” to rely on facebook for lots of our messaging with the ones that won’t switch. But still the value gained through Google+ and any new social networks that may emerge soon will make facebook less and less important as time passes. Remember when MySpace profiles were filled with band spam and silly backgrounds nobody ever liked ? In a few years facebook just like MySpace, will be just another social network. And to be precise, it will be the old fashioned social network that failed because everyone was on it, but it was more about the distractions than the content itself.

By the way, click the icon bellow to circle me on Google plus:

Update: I just found out an oatmeal comic strip which perfectly illustrates my opinion in a much funnier way: