Facebook and Twitter are doomed: why you'll likely leave within two years
Every few years or so, a new online phenomenon comes along and challenges the popularity of the status quo. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL was the most popular online hangout, featuring channels (like pages), email, chat rooms and message boards on nearly any topic imaginable. AOL Instant Messenger was generally the preferred method of quick communication, and much attention was paid to people’s away messages. Just like today’s statuses and tweets, you could try to be as philosophical or creative as you’d like, and many hours were spent browsing those of friends. Likewise, instead of “liking” or “following” people and companies, we were reminded to check them out via their website and their AOL keyword.
As we discussed in Are we in a Web 2.0 bubble? Yes!, once can draw a number of parallels between AOL’s story and today’s online environment. While it seemed AOL would be popular forever, eventually frustrated customers grew tired of endless busy signals when trying to connect. Worse, complaints abounded about AOL’s customer service when people tried to cancel. After the ISP market fragmented as broadband became mainstream, people migrated to Friendster, Xanga, and eventually MySpace, which was big until around 2008. It was popular with teens especially, who created pages for themselves and their favorite bands, topics, and causes, organized parties, and shared the minutiae of their daily lives. When spam grew and their parents started to intrude, they left for Facebook, which is at the top of its segment right now.
However, lately Facebook has had its momentum slowed for two main reasons. First, numerous privacy complaints have led to a general distrust of their business practices, especially related to data sharing. Second, the company has also been playing the game of catch up more and more. They redesigned their main profile pages have more of a real-time feel a la Twitter, and have revamped their privacy controls to more resemble those of Google+.
Why haven’t people left yet? Until now, there wasn’t much of an alternative. Due to technical complexity and slow development, Diaspora never garnered the critical mass needed to take off. Now, as we illustrated in Why Google+ will succeed, Google+ has experienced a pretty successful introduction to the public, and businesses are already anxious to get involved. Ford already has done so as part of a test program, and their Google+ page attracted thousands of followers very quickly.
Businesses might balk at the task of having to maintain yet another online persona, but once a few lead, the rest will follow in short order to negate the perception of being behind the curve and to take advantage of coupons, deals, and other promotional opportunities. Similarly, individual users may not be anxious to migrate their material to a new platform, but they’ve done it before and will do so again once a few friends lead the way. Here are our rebuttals to the most common arguments on this topic:
“I own a business and don’t want to maintain yet another online site.” - People said the same thing when social networking became big, and didn’t want to have to maintain a Facebook page and Twitter feed in addition to their main website. Both services were intended primarily for individuals at first, but once a few businesses jumped on the bandwagon to get ahead, the rest soon followed. Once a few join Google+, FourSquare, or others, the rest will too.
“I like Facebook or Twitter and see no need to switch.” - True, but as we’ve seen several times, as the amount of spam, fake accounts, and irrelevant content creeps up, people will move somewhere more private. Once your friends do, you will too.
“I’ve invested all kinds of posts and pictures already.” – Peer pressure will prevail, and sooner or later people will release utilities to package most of your old material and port it to the new platform with just a few clicks. In fact, just type “migrate f” into a search engine and you’ll receive plenty of suggestions on how to move existing data to Google+.
This article’s title might be dramatic, and this process could, and probably will, take a long time to materialize. But as in cases past, by the time people realize it’s happening, it will have already passed.