Facebook hits 300 million users. What's next for social networking? - washingtonpost.com

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Now that everybody and his mother is on the site, is it time to look for the next big thing in social networking?

By Monica Hesse
Monday, October 19, 2009

Five years from now, will Internet historians signpost the Facebook movie, due out in 2010, as the beginning of the site's end?

"West Wing" writer Aaron Sorkin is writing and producing the flick, called "The Social Network," about Facebook's birth. Jesse Eisenberg will play founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Justin Timberlake is cast as Sean Parker, the first company president.

But will the real star be . . . nostalgia? Will Facebook seem passe, like watching a movie about the invention of VHS? A dramatization of the site could turn it into a time capsule, with fossilized reenactments of the first friend poke.

If "The Social Network" isn't a harbinger of doom, then what is? Last month, the site gained its 300 millionth user and turned a profit for the first time in its six-year history. Can we just Facebook forever, friend requesting until we are officially connected to everyone? (What would that last friend acceptance look like? Osama bin Laden added you as a friend on Facebook. "Oh, all right.")

One year into Facebook's unchallenged social networking domination -- three years ago this month from its availability to the general public -- and suddenly people are beginning to speculate about its demise. Facebook feels "dead," a columnist for the New York Times observes, saying that several of her friends have gone inactive. "Did Facebook Kill Itself?" asks the headline of a recent U.S. News & World Report article. "What's new on the net after Facebook?" writes a listless user going by TabithaFlyin on Help.com. "I'm bored."

All social networking sites eventually die off, mutate or find a second life elsewhere, as evidenced by the ones that have come before. But why are we so eager to move on?

* * *

Remember Friendster?

Remember the mysterious invitations that appeared in your inbox? Someone cooler and more tech-savvy than you had joined and they wanted you to join, too. It's not skeezy, they promised. Remembering this is really about remembering 2003, because that's when buzz about the site peaked, when everyone was Friendstering, Dogstering, Catstering, making verbs out of Web sites.

And then . . .

Then everyone trekked to MySpace -- the (same) invitation from the (same) cool person, the indie bands, the customizable backgrounds. That was 2005-06, although some may be there still.

And then . . .

Then Facebook! Especially for the college-educated crowd, FacebookFacebookFacebook. Facebook groups, Facebook gifts, Facebook existential dilemmas over how to describe your romantic relationships and religious beliefs.

Along the way, you might have joined other sites -- SixDegrees, Orkut, Bebo. But those were brief dalliances that lacked staying power. Now it's mostly Facebook, the fourth most popular Web site in the world according to market research firm ComScore.

And then . . . ?

It's an endless cycle of "and then." Users update their statuses with one hand while packing for a Facebook exodus with the other.

The irony is that while we've been searching for the Next Big Thing, Facebook has never grown faster. The site tripled in size in the past year.

Despite those numbers, there's the ennui. "After Facebook and Twitter what's next on the horizon?" asks a user on Twitter (an argument, perhaps, that whatever is after Facebook, Twitter's not it.)

It's possible that Facebook really is losing some users -- the company does not release its retention data, says spokesman Victor Lu. But it's more likely that people are just getting . . . antsy.

"Facebook as a social networking Web site is not dead," S. Shyam Sundar writes via e-mail. Sundar is the founder of Penn State's Media Effects Research Laboratory, where he studies the psychology of communication technology. "Facebook as a cool new thing" is.

For users new to a social network, the site becomes a full-time addiction. There are old high school teachers to be found, old middle school tormenters to gleefully reject, groups to join and then leave. As each friend is added, there are profiles to stalk and dissect, and perfunctory "tell me about the last seven years of your life" e-mails to exchange. There is the endless care and development of one's own profile, plus the quizzes and the lists.

But after a while, a balance is reached. Users have found all of the people they are going to find. Visits to the site are less about building and more about maintenance. And while friend collecting used to be the de rigueur Facebook activity, the fashionable thing now is the friend purge. Elliott Hoffman, a software engineer in Missouri, describes how he recently went from 300 friends down to 70.

"When I was in college and Facebook had just come out, if you met someone at a party you would friend them," Hoffman says. But as the site approached saturation, "I realized it was just too much noise." He felt compelled to keep up with the minute activities of virtual strangers. Now, with his slimmer friend base, the time he spends on the site is richer in quality, but far less in terms of quantity.

For many users, this balance describes where Facebook is now. It might "feel dead" only in the way that four beers might "feel meager" to a recovering alcoholic who is used to drinking nine.

"It's like that 46-inch LCD HDTV," Sundar writes. "The first week with it was full of excitement with the technology itself, but now, we simply switch it on and think about what's on rather that what it's on."

"There are two conflicting processes," says Jason Kaufman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies social networking sites. "On the one hand, the more people who join Facebook, the more useful it is." On the other hand, its very ubiquity makes some users uneasy. "There's a countervailing tendency toward the fringe -- to want to do things that are not in the mainstream," Kaufman says. "Americans don't want to follow the herd, but they want the convenience of being in the herd."

The fact that the fastest-growing Facebook demographic is users over 55 -- that your latest friend request might be from your grandmother -- doesn't help the coolness factor.

"By definition, it's like bar hopping," says Kurt Cagle, an editor for O'Reilly Media, which publishes technology books. "You want to go to ones before they're popular. You don't want to go to ones that are too crowded. . . . No social media will have huge staying power."

Hip bellwethers within the herd eventually start looking for another place to drink.

* * *

Is this what happened to Friendster?

Shortly after its 2002 founding, the site almost immediately gained several hundred thousand users through word of mouth, but by late 2003 Americans began to leave. They were annoyed by technical difficulties, they were frustrated by some of Friendster's policies, and a rash of sudden mainstream media attention suddenly made the site feel crowded, writes Internet scholar Danah Boyd in an essay on the history of social networking sites.

In early 2004, employees of the site noticed that big traffic spikes were occurring in the middle of the night. Friendster, it seems, was huge in Asia. "We've never let the U.S. go," says Friendster communications director Jeff Roberto. "However, we are focusing on growth where we're dominant and popular." Now the site has 115 million users, 90 percent of whom live in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Social networking site Orkut was a similar story -- in its first year of existence, U.S. users were the largest audience. But as North Americans got flighty, South American users got loyal. Now the company is headquartered in Brazil.

One wonders if all social networking sites' lifecycles eventually include a David Hasselhoff phase -- snubbed in America, gangbusters in Germany.

But Facebook is in a different place than Friendster and Orkut were, by sheer virtue of its enormous size, and by the amount of time users spend on it. People invest so much in social networking sites that it becomes harder to leave, says David Weinberger, a colleague of Kaufman's at Harvard and author of "Everything Is Miscellaneous." In essence, the longer we're on Facebook, the longer we're going to be on Facebook. The question of moving becomes not just logistical but moral and ethical as well. "So many years of contacts, conversations and games" between friends, Weinberger says. "It's hard to transfer that stuff. If I move to a new social network because it's cooler, how much of you am I allowed to move?"

And then . . .

What comes after?

Where would we move to?

Transitioning from Friendster to MySpace was an easy decision, when MySpace appeared to address Friendster user complaints (people wanted to be allowed to create bogus profiles -- say, one for Hermione Granger -- but Friendster deleted the so-called Fakesters). Then Facebook's sparer interface and apparent privacy -- only accepted friends could see your profile -- seemed to address some MySpace users' concerns, making that switch easy, too.

But many social networking experts say that there is nothing obviously poised to overtake Facebook right now -- just vague ideas of what such a site might look like.

"Putting profit and revenue aside, ultimately it seems like some kind of non-proprietary social networking cloud is where we would best be served," says Kaufman. Something that's not trying to make money, where users can exchange information without worrying about being data mined or monetized. "That kind of thing doesn't exist."

Not surprisingly, Facebook believes that the next big thing is . . . Facebook. (Full disclosure: Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board.) "It's critical for any company to keep innovating," Lu says. Innovation "has always been at the core of how we view ourselves."

But assuming there is a next big thing after Facebook, it probably won't be the social networking companies, or the scholars, or the journalists, or the movie industry who accurately predict what it is. It will probably be the 16-year-old kids, same as always, finding their own parent-free space -- followed by their parents, same as always, wanting to make sure that parent-free space doesn't contain anything dangerous. Then grandparents, celebrities, nonprofits, marketers.

By the time there really is a new big thing, we won't realize it until we've all joined up, too.