adrianmott.com

Happened upon this article today, thanks to @socialmedia411 (whose Twitter updates are a wealth of information BTW):

http://econsultancy.com/blog/3611-is-facebook-in-trouble

The first sign of this was the ever unpopular re-design of the site, which made it seem like the company was feeling increased pressure from other social media platforms like Twitter.  Patrico Robles, the article’s author, goes on to talk about Facebook currently looking for another $100 million in capital – assuming that the company is perhaps feeling the pinch of the recessionary advertising decline.  The bad news is that investors are hesitant to invest in the company at this point, pointing to the fact that the prior $15 billion valuation was perhaps a little high.

The second was the very public and abrupt exit of Facebook’s CFO Gideon Yu – speculators assume that this is because the company’s finances are a mess – but this article shows us that their revenues are indeed growing.  More realistically, Mr. Yu left because of clashes with upper management.  But the exit is curious nonetheless.

My opinion goes something more like this: Facebook isn’t as good as a monetary tool for marketing reasons as sites like Twitter are because there is simply not the same sort of massive connection bases within the service.  Personally, I use Facebook to connect with people that I’ve actually met in real life.  If someone wants to be my friend that I don’t know personally, I’m probably going to decline them – I just don’t get any value out of being able to look at their profile and pictures and whatnot.  A friend connection in Facebook feels like more of a commitment than a simple follow on Twitter – something that I may do if I find a person’s ideas interesting.

This doesn’t mean that Facebook is doomed to fail however – in fact I believe that part of their redesign is to make it a more effective marketing tool in their epic search for a business model.  To decrease the formality of a connection in Facebook.  These social media tools are dependent on people connecting with each other and growing huge followings to they can do things like recommend products and services.  At this point, it’s a race to see which service will be the first successful public social networking business.