posted by steve | Category: Random Rants |

Reading a BBC News article today, “Facebook Denies Losing Users” starts the wheels turning.  Two firms are attempting to measure Facebook’s usage and user growth.  One firm (Inside Facebook) is saying that Facebook lost users in May, while another (comScore) is saying that Facebook saw a 21% growth in the U.S. in May.

While I don’t really care if Facebook gained or lost users, I do question how Facebook gains that many new users in a month.   Anecdotally, people seem to either have a Facebook account or not; those that don’t have an account aren’t signing up for one any time soon.  It’s not as if people are just hearing about Facebook, there are no early adopters left.  I’d guess that there’s a huge level of inaccuracy in the third-party measurements.  More likely is that a whole bunch of college-age Facebook users stopped using Facebook from their campus-based locations and started using from home, thus skewing both numbers.

The product life-cycle seems to dictate that Facebook is still in its growth stage but 21% seems like an awful lot of growth. Maybe that growth is coming from spambots and fake user accounts.  As Facebook matures it will be interesting to see how it transitions from the growth stage to maturity.  A competitor is bound to come up with the new shiny which will be competing for people’s attention and at some point there really won’t be subscribers left to sign up for Facebook.  Will Facebook become the application platform of the future?  Could be, but I doubt it.  It’s what’s next that’s interesting.