Quote:

What I’m writing about here is not new or original. I have read a lot about this and have simply grown fascinated by the trend itself, the trend whereby more and more people enjoy the ease and shelter provided by lightweight mobile applications, ones that seemingly never touch the web and spread like a Facebook share. For a brief selection of items I’ve read on the topic, I’d suggest: PandaWhale’s Adam Rifkin on why teens are flocking to Tumblr over Facebook; TechCrunch’s Billy Gallagher on the “impermanence” of new mobile apps; Branch’s Josh Miller’s look into technology trends among teens; and USV’s Andy Weissman’s personal essay about how he doesn’t want to bring video memories from another era on to YouTube.

For me, the meat of Semil's article are these two questions:

"What does this mean for the future of the Facebook newsfeed and its relevance to users? Will Facebook be reduced to a utility for public sharing backed by real identity, but miss out on all the texts, snaps, and other bits of mobile messaging exploding these days?"

I see people reducing their Facebook usage in waves:

1. First were the people worried about privacy implications.

2. Then were the people who kept their Facebook profile as a honeypot but moved most of their activity elsewhere. That way parents, bosses, etc thought they were keeping track of online activity. Nope.

3. Now are the people who are unhappy with the level of noise, spam, and advertising in the news feed. Sturgeon's Law vastly underestimated how much junk there could be in the feeds.

In other words:

#1 stopped people from writing significant things.

#2 had people post occasional harmless stuff so you won't look for the elsewhere.

And #3 is slowing down the rate of readers checking Facebook.

Facebook Home is Pointcast.

And Facebook is Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

Future uncertain.

I think I've invested hours and hours getting my configurations just right so I don't have to see any junk; and all my posts are mostly for me to keep track of events and interesting news for myself, any social interaction is just some small value add.  I am probably the last one to use Facebook places because I can't stand any of the other location services.  I probably won't abandon Facebook anytime soon and I'm  a pretty sophisticated privacy person.  Their walled garden is pretty annoying, but I have enough information reading and writing on other parts of the Web that it's not a barrier to use.

The one thing that annoyed me more than anything is that my iphone went and replaced all my perfectly curated email addresses in my phone contact list and replaced them all with facebook.com email addresses for all of my contacts.  Whoever thought that was a good idea should be taken out and shot.

Thanks for the reminder to not sync Facebook with my phone contact list.

Sounds like you worked really hard to make Facebook useful.

I'm curious to know if the increasing ads in the news feed of the mobile app start to turn you off.

Yes, ads in the mobile news feed FROM APPLICATIONS I'VE BLOCKED pisses me off to no end.   Also, I have a family member who has some extreme political views and goes around liking and and recommending pages with abandon.  I can't block him or unfriend him due to family things, but he pretty much pollutes my whole online experience too in the ads and recommendations.   My solution is I just don't use it as much.  I also turn chat off and no matter how many times I do, Facebook keeps resetting it to be on.  The bottom line is I just use it less and less.  If G+ would just get Angry Birds friends and Angry Birds Star Wars, and I could easily mark a G+ post as auto-post to facebook, I could easily see never logging in again. 

Old soldiers don't close their facebook accounts, they just fade away.

Okay, wait, that's not entirely true.  I am the admin for 3 pages that are consistently gaining in popularity. One for a video game, one for a trader joe's product, one for an auto show.  I would feel bad abandoning them because I feel like I kind of made a commitment to the user group.  I guess I could always make someone else the admin and then fade away, but I'd like to check them from time to time.

And that makes sense. The page maintainers stay for their audiences.

But yeah, you pointed to two annoyances that will get worse: noisy friends and bad ads.

"The bottom line is I use it less and less." This is how Facebook shrinks: when many people use it less.

Okay, but Facebook is still in the Pragmatists stage of the mainstream market.  They have a *long* way to go to screw up royally.

Good point. It's not like we're deleting our accounts even if we are using Facebook less.