Facebook’s Downfall: The Unreliability of Virtual
Friends (Jornal de Noticias,
Portugal)
“If current explanations
of Facebook’s market drop were to be fully validated,
we would then be able to say that the planet has resisted the overwhelming
temptation to confuse real friends with virtual ones, be they from Facebook or any other Internet-based social network.”
How ready for consumption is Facebook?
That question, which I posted here on May 19th, was a result of my perplexity over
the Initial Public Offering of stock in the social network valued at $100
billion.
Four weeks later, stockbrokers have been giving their
answer: it seems that Facebook is not ready for
consumption after all.
Consider: within 12 days, Facebook’s
listing on the stock exchange went from a high of $45 to a low of $26.80.
Various pieces of sociological data may help us explain the epiphenomenon
of such a meteoric stock market bomb. This week, an opinion poll carried out by
the international news agency Reuters found that 34 percent of American
citizens who use Facebook are spending
less time on the site than they did six months ago because in their own
words, the social network had become “boring,” “not relevant” and “not useful” [video below].
Digital market analysts still explain Facebook’s
stock market rise and fall by explaining that the world’s most widely-known
social network is still unable to adapt to the use of the mobile devices which
dominate the third generation of the Internet by its users.
Posted by Worldmeets.US
Of course, these are the same analysts who believe that Facebook may experience a stock market revival - a second
chance at life in the world of business - if it succeeds in attracting new
customers in the form of “smartphone” users. But
there are sceptics who simply believe that despite
having been around for nearly a decade, Facebook has
been hit by fatigue in the form of a degenerative disease.
Time will tell.
One thing that’s certain, however, is that the data provided
by the Reuters survey provide conclusive evidence of Facebook’s
incapacity to transform its 900 million users into dollars. One of the more
complex explanations provided is devastating for any brand looking to secure a
place in the business world - which regards the stock market as a good place for
people looking to invest their savings: four out of five Internet users have
never bought a product or service because of the comment of a Facebook friend.
If such explanations were to be fully validated, we would
then be able to say that the planet has resisted the overwhelming temptation to
confuse real friends with virtual ones, be they from Facebook
or any other Internet-based social network.
The halt in Facebook’s U.S. ascendancy
is being compensated for by its penetration of emerging countries like Brazil
or China, where it is looking to boost its number of users to a billion. But
the fact remains that the trend in the United States seems to mark the end of myth:
one in which virtual friendships can be just as valued as real ones.
