Facebook...the billion user interface that has remarkably managed to change the way humans interact with each other on the day to day. That's not nearly a way to describe what Facebook is, or better yet, what it has become. Some would argue that it's one of the world's greatest websites. Some would suggest it's the world's most greatest demise.
We look at the things that make Facebook successful: Billions of user profiles with searchable content from our lives. All this key content then used to target, control, and persuade our buying habits and the way we consume. Ad dollars pour in from politics and big corporations, who all want a piece of the pie because they believe that Facebook can't be challenged.
Well, it's no secret that the key to bringing Facebook down, is to remove the "Book" from the "Faces." It's a pretty simple idea, yet no one's ever realized this, except for Facebook itself.
The, "Book," is that rich content they have on its users. Content includes, Likes, Photos, Bios, Work info, Status, Networks, Location...etc. The, "Face," itself...well, that's you and I. That's our profile picture staring at our network of friends in the face, or if your settings are on "Public" then you're picture is looking at everyone. Separate the two out, you're left with the key of taking down Facebook, and that's been evident in created sites like, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, foursquare, and Match.
The buyout of Instagram by Facebook, only proves a great point. That is simply to kill an idea only because of threat or monetary gain. Clearly those two concepts were packaged in one for Facebook, like killing two birds with one stone. All Instagram is, is a simple way for people to post pictures to friends. There's really nothing more to it, aside from making the experience easy and a little more fun. You don't hear the stories of stalkers pinpointing your locations by removing geotags from your photos on Instagram either, unlike you do with Facebook. You don't hear about companies that you're interviewing for a job at, trying to pry into your photos looking to see if you're the right person to fit their culture. You don't get people seeing your photos that aren't really your friends, but they are your friends because you feel bad if you don't add them to your profile on Facebook...you know...those people.
Twitter was a phenomenon that I feel a lot of people have lost wind of. Essentially, it removed the status updates from Facebook and packaged it better to include trending talks, ideas, and locational whereabouts of friends. This was probably the creator of this concept of, Removing the Book from the Face.
What else can we remove and repackage on Facebook? Simple...EVERYTHING. We can take games and put them on dedicated app plattforms that lets users sync up. We can take Bios and make them specifically tailored to relationship matching, Match.com. We can even take the professional aspects of our careers and package that specifically into something like Linkedin.com. We can take our locational whereabouts and let our friends on foursquare know where we really are.
After the content is gone, what is going to be left on Facebook? I have a profile that has over 600 "Friends." Some of whom I never get a chance to read about because they never update their pages anymore. I love the fact that these people are all able to connect to me at some level, or vice versa, but when will that ever be necessary for the average person to need or want access to hundreds of people at once? What Facebook will be left with is a picture of me and old content from my loving Facebook days of 2004...life goes on.
The onset of competitors continues to pick apart the Book of Facebook, and I believe that the site itself cannot sustain without crashing. Facebook will probably be the world's most overpriced stock in a month and that will be sad because the system will eventually sink it. There has never been anything in the history of our civilization, in where something with so much power and size, has NOT fallen.
I'm excited to see this happen in 3 years time.
