Social Network fatigue: Facebook fatigue etc
I used to be thrilled when I received spam. Note: used to. Remember when you first got email? You were excited to have it printed on a business card: blahblah@compuserv.com or thinguymmybob@aol.com. Then you swapped email addresses with colleagues – and those friends and family members that were early adopters. A couple of times a…
I used to be thrilled when I received spam. Note: used to.Remember when you first got email? You were excited to have it printed on a business card: blahblah@compuserv.com or thinguymmybob@aol.com. Then you swapped email addresses with colleagues – and those friends and family members that were early adopters. A couple of times a week your email application – Eudora? or a terminal emulator onto UNIX? – would boing and you’d rush to the machine and see what amazing (usually long multipage emails, like pen pal letters) had been sent to you. Then you got over it and stopped using email.
Oh wait….
By the way, I still play World of Warcraft after 2 and 1/2 years – I have characters on multiple servers with different bunches of friends on each, so it’s varied social networks. And I still use email, but not as much. Email being one of the first peer-to-peer, asynchronous communication tools in online communities.
A few people have posted that I’m suffering from Facebook fatigue. Well yes and no. There IS a trough after the honeymoon period. But it’s unlikely that most people will stay off for long. Perhaps the hours and hours a day will turn into a quick check once or twice a day, and Facebook does suffer from being a superficial filtering tool rather than an indepth depth of content site, but still – it’s doubtful that they will lose ground quickly.
The Register doesn’t agree:
The story year-on-year is even uglier for social networking advocates. Bebo and MySpace were both well down on the same period in 2006 – Murdoch’s site by 24 per cent. Facebook meanwhile chalked up a rise, although way off its mid-2007 hype peak when you couldn’t move for zeitgeist-chasing “where’s the Facebook angle?” stories in the press and on TV. (hat tip: Stilgherrian)
You can survey the full numerical horror for youself here at Creative Capital.
Err that rise mid 2007 was with the release of F8 application development (the ability to add Scrabulous and Zombies to your profile). Think of it as Facebook 2.0 if you will. It’s a good idea for ANY social network to have an “expansion pack” plan – world of warcraft picked up a few more million paying members with Burning Crusade.
I’m not loyal to every social network I sign up for -not even close – but there are a few that stick. And stick and stick.
RSS fatigue hit me bad last week. The answer was unsubscribing from more than half of them.
Heh, I was one of those people that said you’re suffering from Facebook fatigue, but only because you implied that in your Facebook status message 😛
@steven noble good to see I wasn’t one of ’em! 😛
@lil sis Sometimes we yell and slam doors and walk out. It doesn’t have to mean anything – except the honeymoon is over. BTW some people will suffer Facebook fatigue – but I hope they had an introduction to social networks and move into one (niche) more suited for them.
Facebook fatigue hit me quite soon when I was constantly bombarded with requests to join groups and add applications. I started declining and deleting to make it more manageable but still use it regularly – Some of my younger friends and relatives are using it as a primary means of communication. Now older friends who have never used online applications before, barring maybe Hotmail, are getting on the bandwagon.
A friend of my daughters is visiting from Canada, arriving here today after touring Asia. I was interested to observe that although she had not been online for weeks, the first thing she did was not to her check email but log in to read her Facebook messages.