FaceBook Fatigue?

Are we lesser interweb mortals suffering from Facebook Fatigue? Twitter Tire-Out?

Social Media is now maturing very rapidly in terms of new acquisitions. Also many believe a high degree of gaurdedness, even cynicism is needed when sharing private details and even your name and location on SM.

From another perspective looking at innovation: the web sites have somehow backwardly evolved from being young, quick evolving Gazelles into would-be dinosaurs of the itnernet: Their own weight of internal management and number of members globally makes it hard for several SM sites to evolve and now excluded any full revolution to a new format for their home pages.

FB is only really trying in becoming fully interconnected: The latest is importing your skype contacts so you can read about maybe a couple more half-known people and the minutiae of their micro blogs.

I belive the current sites: FB, Linked-InTwitter and Blogger (all TM recognised) ,and the other smaller brands will not only have a declining return on recruitment of new users, but they will struggle to hold the interest of many users and the trust of others, talking about not just facebook fatigue, but facebook farewells or making new, guarded profiles.

People are getting bored with the format, the selective post displays and the functionality of FB. Also many of the "On FB" 40% on average in most western countries, are not very active and the ones with most time are teenagers ( low spend) and narcissists, kind of self brands.

I think there are two or I think FB / twitter is addictive: one there are the narcisists who crave the attention they get for their posts and the related "social light bulbs" who must incessently touch other people and be touched otherwise they don't exist. Then there are the opposites, and the wannabees: People like me who wonder why their friends are not more active on FB and wonder if there is a good social value in it. The wannabees want to be social media nodes, where they become narcissitic and don't need to nurture other posters with more than occaisional comments and links back to their own little world in SM.

In other words, the followers want often to be followed: they are not benign little lap dogs who utterly dote on what the lead writers post, but rather they are traffic steelers wanting to shine from a rub off from a top blogger, FBer or twatter.

Where the real social network value is lies with mobile, always on. Even then it can be a bit tedious to arrange any social life, and better to avoid the fluff and just send an SMS. Also how much can we have as public?


I set a rule on my FB use a while ago and social value: For people I added or whom added me, if I posted something to their wall/ comment/ image and got ignored, talked over, then I would just delete them immediately from pals list. Perhaps they had me straight onto ignore, either way I am not interested. I try to keep my FB down to under 60, and even then I find that FB hides interesting posts from family which I have no interest in hiding!

A while ago I destroyed my own smart phone, having had a few from companies also, but I just popped into a shop and got el cheapo ....it is great: the batteries last a week, if not two with just SMSing. It starts up in 5 seconds and never crashes in any of the functions. It even has a calendar which you can import and export to SMS! And I love it: no distractions, just a monotone LCD screen which does SMSes very nicely and will not run out of juice when someone needs to call me.

This phone parallel is apt: what do you need from a social space?