Why Facebook Is Doomed

Bruce Nussbaum nails a criticism of Facebook’s pathological business model, basically saying that strip-mining user’s social relationships will not work. Users will reject this as an affront.

Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal

Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

Facebook’s business model, however, demands the opposite. It is trying to transform the private into a public arena it can offer advertisers.

It is exactly this change that dooms Facebook. Users’ expectations are being overturned.

Twitter — which has been based on a publicy model from the outset doesn’t have this problem. Facebook is in trouble because of forcing people form privacy to publicy without their agreement.

Yes, Facebook may back out of this last cycle of abuse, but there may be no happy medium.