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The Story:
The year is 2005. Brad Greenspan, Tom Anderson and their team of dedicated programmers have built an empire using a relatively new method of communication and social interaction – a social media website, a medium allowing people to connect and interact with people all over the world sharing common interests, to make new friends, and to advertise their companies and bands. In July, he sells the company to News Corporation for $580 million. For three years, MySpace was the largest social networking site in the world. After that, in a few short years, the userbase would decline and it would be worth only a fraction. News Corporation would watch their investment dwindle, watching their customer base slowly trickle to the new guy on the block – Facebook.
This is the process of creative destruction that happens so frequently in a free (or relatively free) market. One company creates an idea, another company improves on it, and if the original company can’t innovate quick enough, it gets washed away on the shores of history. The second company goes on to enjoy all the spoils of pandering to an ever-fickle and frequently disloyal consuming public. Then, the cycle begins again.
The question is, how long is Facebook’s cycle going to last? Many contenders have risen and fallen, and many more have risen and stagnated: TSU, Diaspora, Google+. Customers are aware to some extent that Facebook likes to use its users for social experiments, but that does not deter them, with the appeal of convenience and a network effect maintaining their presence. Princeton University predicts that Facebook doesn’t have long left, and by 2017 we may see an exodus.
What will the next wave of social media bring – social media 3.0? How will new platforms such as Synereo and Minds.com entice their potential user base – monetarily, or otherwise? What will it take for you to give up on the Book of Faces? We ask these questions and more in the next exciting chapter of … The Paradise Paradox!
The Links:
Synereo
Minds.com
TSU
MySpace
The Paradise Paradox on Facebook
Facebook sorry – almost – for secret psychological experiment on users
Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers
Why Facebook Will Probably Not Die Out By 2017