In August I received this email from Facebook, which was similar to one I received in June:
and like others I received this over the weekend – telling me that I has not been to Facebook in the last few days, and that, well, nothing has really happened anyway.
There are several things wrong with these emails.
The first is the assumption from Facebook that I need to visit their site every day or two. I don’t, and nor does anyone. Meanwhile the amount of ‘events’ that I have ‘missed’ is trivial, and is dwarfed by the activity on Twitter. While Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) is a nice tool, we should never feel that everything that scrolls by requires a piece of our ever decreasing attention.
The second is the rudeness of it all. Even if I were still at school and all of my classmates were on Facebook, this email is so arrogant that I would be tempted to say goodbye – at least for a few hours. Perhaps I would even start a competition with my friends for the email with the greatest number of missed events.
Thirdly, and most amusingly the email doesn’t seem to take into account activity via Facebook apps or by the email to reply feature of Facebook comments and messages. So ultimately Facebook is telling me to interact with Facebook when in fact I have been doing so.
Overall I see this as another signal that Facebook’s time in the sun will end.
Lance Wiggs 
It will be interesting to see where Facebook goes in the next 5 years. They have around 750 million registered users which must be close to the maximum possible, once you take out third world, infants etc. The churn rate is now really just as high as the new sign up rate, but they won’t tell you that, once signed up you stay on their books forever.
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Maybe FB should use GrabOne’s “intentionally pathetic” approach? http://i54.tinypic.com/4izkh0.png
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I think people are tired with ‘generic’ social networks but they’re thirsty for social activity that is centered around things they care about, that’s what I gathered from our experience with nzemperor.com
Also related: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2011/09/18/TheRealProblemWithFacebook.aspx
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I don’t think facebook even has a sustainable business model. I think it is a fad, but you can tell they are very worried, and that one big worry is google. I don’t like facebook, I don’t like using it or the way they run it. Nor do I have an account for personal use, I just use it for business purposes.
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I’ve never used Facebook for the reason that it is timewasting for me.
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