Facebook : because you love Karaoke nights with your colleagues.

Note from the editors:

We add today a new author/collaborator, and we are very happy to have this new french input… A few days ago Laure sent us her text and we made it a little bit more colourfull by adding some side images/videos to complete the idea… If anybody wants to follow her example, please do…

Merci Laure!

Facebook  used to be the new gay disco downtown everybody wanted to go to. Then it became the largest student nightclub. Now it’s more like an old Karaoke bar you’re bound to go with people you did not really choose to see.

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Facebook is growing, 175 millions users worldwide (check this)… all right… that is to say twice more than a year ago. But don’t be impressed by figures. Even the King of the night Bill Gates left the network a week ago.

Remember five years ago Friendster. People were spending so much time on this network. But Facebook and Myspace killed Friendster as Macumba nights killed the Moonlight ones.

Why do people leave one social network for another ? New applications maybe. For sure, with Friendster you could not send snowballs or do vampires bites to your contacts.

But the blogger Cory Doctorow gives another explanation ( read Cory ). According to him, social networks have built-in self-destructs mechanisms. His theory : They make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid. ( your boss if you’re more than 25, your parents if you’re under 18)

How do you manage if one of them adds you as a friend ? Ignoring him would make you feel unconfortable, refusing him would be totally hostile. Only one solution : Running away from the network.

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A social network is like your favourite bar or your favorite restaurant. If you meet your colleagues, ex-co-workers or your parents, you feel less free than you used to feel. You’re ready to find another favourite place. Do your really feel like you want to be poked in front of the L’Oreal recruiting agents (poke this one) who just logged in on Facebook ?

Social pariah will put an end to facebook. People who post weird and unfunny videos on your funwalls are like people who would dance « La danse des canards » (frenchy goose dance) on the dancefloor of a nightclub. They are having fun but everybody runs away.

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In the US the average time spent on facebook decreased (it´s going down man!) from december 2007 to january 2008.

The only difference : it is way more difficult to leave facebook than to pick up your coat at the cloakroom of the old Karaoke bar. Cause even if you close your facebook account, the site does not delete all the informations that it contained. As the Eagles used to say in Hotel California « You can check out anytime but you can never leave ».

Wait … what was this song about again ?

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