In my case against Facebook I made the point that that the hubris surrounding Mark’s Great White Whale was more than a little overblown. More importantly, the cries that Facebook was some kind of business networking tool were almost laughable.

I was not alone in pointing this out but in typical fashion, we were mostly ignored. Luckily, someone with a bit more clout over at the New York Times has decided to take up the charge. Alias Mathais, in an exquisitely structured polemic, makes it clear that Facebook is now what it has always been, a place for college students to waste time.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets analyze where the big Blue Book is heading.

Facebook

Before I start let me make this point. Facebook is a great social network, a great place for people to communicate with one another, and a great place for developers to test out new ideas in what basically amounts to the world’s largest online focus group. What it is not and will never be is a sophisticated business networking tool. Not because people can’t use it like one, but because that is not the way the software is structured and not the way the core college audience has shaped it to be.

To test this out, go to any college in the continental United States and ask a group of Freshman what they use Facebook for, then repeat that test with Seniors. My theory is the only difference is that Seniors will use it slightly less often.

More than anything, Mark and the team seems to be suffering from a chicken and egg problem. Somewhere along the lines they forgot how they became popular. Worse, they forgot why they have pretty much crushed their closet U.S. competition, Myspace.

Here is a hint, it had absolutely nothing to do with “Social graphs”.

The reason that it picked up such a cult following was that it solved a few very real problems. The most important of which was that it allowed college Freshman who felt disconnected from their high school social networks to “collect” new friends. Add this to the fact that it made it easier for people who were already within walking distance of one another to communicate and you can see why it picked up steam so quickly.

Social networks like Facebook work best when they act as an addendum to real world networks. Why? When you have a small group of friends that actually have some real connection to one another then all that profile stalking, status updating, and picture uploading makes sense. When you feel like you are communicating with someone real then you are a lot more likely to use the system.

When you are just adding strangers to some kind of ad hoc, semi-professional rolodex then the odds of you ever caring to “check in on them” are slim to none.

Facebook works on the same principles as a middle school playground, or an office break room.

In the rush to live up to the hype put out by marketers the world over, Facebook has lost focus on nurturing the feeling of a closely knit, physically connected group of “friends” who care about every insignificant detail of each other’s lives. Considering the almost mythic levels of tabloidesque voyeurism that goes on in the Valley, I am a little surprised that so many of them find it hard to see how critical this is to Facebook’s future.

The moment that college students start feeling like a cog in the great undifferentiated mass, that is when some other smaller, more focused network will come along to stick a few spears into Facebook’s bloated carcass.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Frank Herbert once said that the only way to survive even a small amount of fame is by having a sense for the sardonic. Unfortunately, having a $15 Billion valuation makes it very easy to start taking yourself seriously. Facebook can expand but it needs to start doing so more intelligently. A social network containing the net, unsorted population of the planet Earth is useless.

I don’t want to manage twelve different networks of people I have mostly never met and certainly care nothing for.

I don’t need 500 different applications vying for my attention every time I sign in. There are only so many Groups, Causes, Pokes, Prods and Platforms that any person cares about.

All I want back is that system that I “simply had to” update twice a week just so all my friends could see what they missed last weekend.

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