Snippet: Facebook is Too Big, Fail ☇

M.G. Siegler:

Facebook is not dying as a business, but they’ve died as a brand. The company needs to move on to ‘what’s next’ as quickly as possible to distance themselves from the social network. This is nothing new, of course — I wrote this over six years ago. They’ve more or less been trying to do this for years. But even in creating an umbrella company, they called it ‘Facebook’, which was dumb. It was the exact opposite of what they should have done. Because, again, Facebook, the brand, is over.

It seems pretty clear that Mark Zuckerberg both realizes this and doesn’t want to realize this. But the latter is his mistake. It’s too late and the longer he and they take to realize this, the worse off the company will be as a result. They might think that all of this will blow over, as it always does, or that all of this is “illogical”, which it also is to some extent. But again, that doesn’t matter. There’s the rationalist world and then there’s the reality of the situation. The powers that be have chosen Facebook as the poster child. The tech elites are tired of Facebook. And the younger generation has no desire to use Facebook. So…

I think when Facebook was starting out, we all liked it, but were used to a new social network taking over every few years—it replaced Friendster and MySpace and we assumed Twitter or something else would eventually pick up, except Facebook is still around. People feel anxious about leaving because they might miss out. Nonetheless, the growth isn’t there and it might be time to think about what’s next for the company.