In the age of social media, we all have so many and I mean soooooooooo many platforms to choose from. Social media platforms for everyone interest including video, photography and or local news. However, in the end they all do the same thing. It really just comes down to what's hot and trending. Yesterda it was MySpace and later it became Facebook. Mind you that I'm not including Twitter on this. Why? Twitter is not your average platform because it is in its own category. It is social but it also a text to the webobsphere on steroids. Enough said about that, let me get back on on topic.
Facebook had its run back in 2008 when the first election ran heavy on social media. It had been hot before that but mostly kids were using it. After it became popular, everyone wanted to be on Facebook but with an older crowd came its demise. Why you ask? Simply because the older once the older crowd came, (the parents of the younger crowd), the younger crowd felt they no longer could coexist with their parents in the same circles. Well of course, this makes sense because in the real world, you don't hang out with your parents when you're in your teens. Parents also brought a sense of responsibility which meant that privacy was about to become a big issue. Parents became the stick by which Facebook would eventually get beat by. Wired's new cover with the face of the founder looking like he took a beating is a great example of how Facebook has in fact become an example of social irresponsibility. When a social platform forgets that the people who have trusted you this whole time are part of a global attack to impose political views by a rogue ad campaign with fake news. Understandably the people feel as if they have been taken advantage of and with good reason. But what happened to FB can happen to any platform of course, but FB has consistently made so many changes to their privacy settings that it has at times left users at the risk of what their app developers can mine from.
Next to privacy, the next big problem for Facebook is being everything to everyone. A company that wants to be everything to everyone in one platform will for the most part fail. Facebook started out as a university Rolodex to connect online and then moved becoming popular to the wider young crowd on the Internet. It was mainly a social status, what are you doing as the form box used to read. You would tell it and everyone knew what was on your mind or what you were doing. Photos, personal content, that was it. It then opened up to business profiles and clubs and organizations which was also perfectly fine. However, most recently it became a news server of information by allowing just about anyone to disperse news on its platform, as well as soon to become a food delivery and craigslist type post your items for sale and sell them storefront. That is a lot to keep up with when your company hasn't figured out just how does it sustain in the future as a relevant platform. Currently, Facebook's customer base is decreasing and the crowd is feeling abused do to the Russia ad scandal that they served users with fake ads.
Unless Facebook can turn the corner like Apple did in 1998 when it's stock was down to $20 or so dollars, Facebook will indeed become another MySpace and join the social media junkyard. Maybe I'm blowing smoke here, but in my opinion Twitter seems to be the better contender in the social media space. My proof? When something is happening anywhere in the world, Twitter is the place to be. Even news enterprises are flocking to Twitter to get their news. Why, because anyone and everyone who is a Twitter user is more active than a user on Facebook. Twitter in fact lives up to it's logo and name. People behave like birds and flock to and with the trends. 