Many users are currently unable to access their Facebook accounts
I, along with many, many other people started my “hard core” social networking on MySpace. And I, along with many others stopped using MySpace in favour of Facebook. One of the drivers for my move was because people could not mess with the page so much so that you couldn’t find things, but the primary reason was because MySpace was getting very flakey.
You would be unable to log in to your account, or images wouldn’t load, or pages would load without CSS so you couldn’t work out what was up or down. It was a very good reason to leave, the site already absorbed a lot of my time – I was not going to sit through hundreds of constant issues.
This is now becoming the case with Facebook. The exact symptoms I described above are becoming commonplace now for Facebook users, and people are increasingly getting fed up with it. To make matters worse, Facebook “Technical Support” is non-existent. Reading articles about the recent mass account lockouts that Facebook as been undergoing shows that messages sent to the Facebook support desk are simply ignored, or replied to with a “We are aware and are working on it” type response.
What’s the next step – is somebody poised as Facebook was to take over? Or, unlike MySpace, will Facebook realise the risk of running a poor service is loosing your user base.
I would assume that finally the reality of “Internet Worth” and “Real Worth” are crashing in on Facebook. In early 2008 Facebook was being valued at around $3 Billion. For something to be worth that much, I would suggest that it needs to show that sort of revenue potential. And whilst advertising is what drives the internet, I don’t think a single point for advertising such as Facebook could ever hope to generate that kind of money. With earnings in 2007 of around $150 million, and no clear idea of what their operating expenses were at that time, it’s hard to see how much of it was profit.
I like the concept behind Facebook, it’s nice to be able to look at friends pictures and see what they are doing / thinking via status updates. But I am not in any way “loyal” to Facebook. I have no reason to hang in with them as they go through technical difficulties with the promise of it getting better. If somebody came along and offered me something that worked, and my friends were moving across too – I would discard Facebook in the same manner I discarded MySpace.
