Why Facebook Will Fade

First of all, let me say that I like social communities and I’ve been a proponent of it for a long time. Back in the 80’s when I was around 12-14 years old I used to call Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my 300/300 baud modem – yes that’s correct 300 bits/s – connected to my Commodore 64 and doing basically the same thing that drives people to Facebook and other social networks; communicating with friends.

My problem is not with the idea of Facebook but with the implementation of it.

Facebook will crumble and be replaced by other communities in the future for a couple of reasons, one of which is spelled FBML. That’s the reason Textpattern was succeeded by Wordpress and if you don’t know what Textpattern is, you’ve more than proved my point.

Much like Textpattern – which had equal market share with Wordpress a little over a year ago – Facebook decided to go with its own Meta Language. That rarely sits well with developers. Spending time learning something that is likely to be a fad is not something that anyone likes to do. You do it because you have to. You do it because there’s no alternative.

Now there’s an alternative.

OpenSocial by Google is about to be launched, and if it has the hallmarks of any other Google product, it’s likely to be good. Very good.

OpenSocial is an API in standard code that hooks into a variety of social networks i.e. you will be able to re-use your already existing PHP code and not tweak it half as much as when writing your Facebook apps.

There are other reasons that Facebook eventually will fade away, such as the fact that it has no original idea behind it (easy to switch to another network more close to home, whenever such network becomes available), and that it’s gone totally overboard already with media coverage, which is usually the tell tale sign that something’s passed its peak.

No matter how many other reasons, I believe the main reason is the fact that grass roots will leave it whenever a viable option becomes available to spread cool apps and get to show the world how great you are using standard code languages. That time is approaching fast.