Point Oh!

There is a lot of talk today about the growth of Facebook and how it is outpacing many of its peers, such as LinkedIn.  Yes, Facebook is a phenomenon and its growth is impressive but is Facebook really any different from Friendster and MySpace or will it experience the same bell curve that they did?

For starters, let’s look at how MySpace overtook Friendster.  Friendster was the first social network to really get traction in the US and Generation X embraced it.  Like many sites of it’s day, Friendster had trouble scaling to meet demand.  The site would often freeze and the overall speed was making it increasingly unusable.  On top of that, Friendster was slow to add new features so the market was ripe for MySpace, a social network where anything goes.

MySpace allowed people to hack their layouts and do just about anything you could do with HTML within its pages.  On top of that, it was a responsive site with fewer barriers than Friendster.  The shift was swift.  Within six months you could see Friendster’s growth tapering off and MySpace shooting towards the sky.  A star was born and MySpace was the new king of social networks.

Of course, the very flexibility that made MySpace attractive was also a contributing factor in limiting it’s user base.  The site was bought by Fox and everything from the ads to the custom layouts to the interface itself became too loud and low brow for many of the more desirable demographics.  Some users’ home page customizations would actually hurt your eyes to look at and no likes to have a co-worker sneak up on you with some risque online dating ad on the screen.  The ground was fertile for Facebook.

Facebook began as an extension of a school yearbook and you could only get an account if you had a valid college email address.  This barrier was quickly dropped but that didn’t mean that Facebook would become the free-for-all that MySpace was.  Facebook would allow customization but only to a degree and they would keep their interface fairly lean to not only speed up the site but also it wouldn’t alienate your parents.  It was a nice enough cocktail that Facebook would gain popularity as quickly as MySpace and overtake their biggest competitor just as MySpace’s traffic was beginning to flatten.

So what happens next?  If the cycle repeats itself, Facebook will begin to flatten out and a new kind of social network (maybe Friendfeed) will take over.  Right?

While Facebook will certainly begin to flatten out soon – probably in the next 12 months – they’re learning from history and taking steps to avoid extinction.  For one, the company is hyper-aware of user experience.  When the site started to feel like it was getting taken over by third party applications, they changed the interface and gave application developers less of an incentive to take over your personal feed.  They also launched Facebook Connect, a fascinating new technology that enables a degree of data portability and gives Facebook users the right to take their profile out into the Internet and use it in new ways.  It’s pretty clear that Facebook is more concerned with adapting to its environment than it is with extracting value out of every page view.

So what is the antidote to social network extinction?  Maybe it’s as simple as putting the emphasis back on user experience and being flexible enough to adapt to the changes happening on your network and in the industry as a whole.