Opinion: Why I'm not surprised people are bored of Facebook!

Jonathan Weinberg writes…

You can have too much of a good thing, isn’t that how the saying goes. Who wants sex, chocolate and alcohol every minute of the day? Eventually you’re going to getting a little tired of the same old daily routine.

I speak as a self-confessed Facebook addict when it first launched. I spent ages on there, ensuring I had more friends than everyone else on my friends-list, updating my status every five seconds, adding new pictures and sitting there transfixed by what my increasing social circle was up to. It’s like voyerism, only legal, and without the naughty stuff.

Why did it bothered me X was visiting the farm, or Y was updating their profile from their mobile while sitting on the toilet? I’ll tell you why, because it was new, it was innovative and it was a distraction from everyday life.

But since Facebook has become my everyday life, my interest has waned. I’ve not changed my status in nearly a week, last put snaps up before Christmas and my Blackberry battery is staying juiced-up for longer as I neglect to check it while on the move.

So it doesn’t surprise me that Facebook’s user numbers are falling. So-called “Facebook fatigue” has been highlighted with a five per cent drop from 8.9 million unique visitors to the website in December to 8.5 million last month. But it’s still 712 per cent higher than a year ago and nine per cent higher than three months ago.

I don’t think Mr. Zuckerberg will be losing too much sleep but Facebook is now suffering from the very problems that MySpace did. It’s become a victim of it’s own success. It’s no longer as cool as it once was and it’s being infiltrated by celebrities, big-name brands and, even worse, politicians.

I can’t see it regaining that same cool it had when it launched, and the same wow factor. And it’s going to take something very special to come along to capture the UK public’s imagination in the same way. Social networks are not dead by any means, but they are certainly on the downward part of the graph for a while yet.

The next few months is going to see loads of Facebook copycat sites springing up, the ones planned when the real site was big news. They’ll disappear as fast as they arrive thankfully, but I do hope something arrives from left field to tempt us back into the social-networking space.

I’m not going to be logging out of Facebook totally, it’s a great resource when used in moderation. Less is certainly more, and if everyone acted like that, it might actually regain some popularity. At the moment, every cough, cry and fart from millions of users is being viewed by, well, millions of users. Not to mention the pointless groups. And I couldn’t really care less
anymore – let alone be bothered to poke or want to be poked.

It’s sad, because Facebook caught our beliguered internet imaginations like nothing else since Friends Reunited. And maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps when push came to shove, we actually realised, we didn’t want to be friends with all these random people after all.

There’s been the security worries of too much personal information being exposed, the fears over paedophiles looking for kids to prey on and the usual heartaches and heartbreaks when you’re forced into a Facebook break-up with your former boyfriend or girlfriend, let alone the tears when you see them hooked up with someone new.

To coin a phrase – Jonathan is… BORED of Facebook – and it’s obvious I’m not the only one!

Are you bored of Facebook? Or is your passion for it as strong as ever? Post a comment below…

Via Times Online