Quote – Ben Rowe

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I asked marketing polymath Ben Rowe his thoughts on Facebook in 2008 and if it is going to grow or decline…

Response

“Facebook is so 2007…. it’s just p2p spam. I reckon facebook is going to die a fairly fast death this year.”

Sure the jury is still out, but it wouldn’t be the first time Ben’s predicted the future of a brand or launch. It does seem that there was something very wrong when Zuckerberg referred to his ‘army of viral marketers’ he forgot one thing…. viral marketing is always done by people, not companies. Abuse them and lose them.

The gaping void view in December was this

gaping-void-zuckerberg.jpg

I still think facebook is a great platform (especially the app’s component) which needs to take a few steps back before everyone disappears. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

4 thoughts on “Quote – Ben Rowe”

  2. Sure Todd, would be happy to 🙂 How about a the winner gets the book of their choice from Amazon, from the loser?

    Let me clarify my position a little. Do I think that nobody will be using Facebook by the end of the year? No. But I’m willing to bet that total number of active users (ie logging on to facebook more than once a week) will begin to fall, and will be way less by the end of the year than there is now.

    I agree with you Todd, Facebook is awesome. But here are a few reasons why I think 2008 will be the year of Facebook fatique:

    – Everyone is on Facebook. Which means that the people in our lives that we don’t want to keep in touch with, we keep in touch with. (Probably the biggest reason off gone off it is that my Mother in-law recently signed up and asked to be my friend!)

    – Application overload. Facebook pages are starting to look just like myspace pages with all the superwalls, super-pokes, and “p2p spam” that I mentioned to Steve. If anyone else sends me a werewolf invitation, I’m gonna knife them. It’s become way too cluttered.

    – The advertising. Facebook is a ‘personal’ space – people don’t want to be advertised to there. But the advertising revenue opportunity is too great to ignore, so Mark Zuckerburg will, despite recent setbacks, try again to cash in on this. He has to, because the company won’t be worth $15Bill for much longer unless he does. But users will turned off by whatever new advertising model is implemented, and Facebook will ultimately jump the shark. If it hasn’t already.

    Mainstream social networking is here to stay, absolutely. But I don’t think Facebook will ultimately be the platform for it. I think, like many are predicting, in 2008 we’ll see the fragmentation of social networks online, so that people will use social networks specifically targeted towards their areas of interest.

    And I think microblogging platforms like Twitter, etc will continue to grow this year, as they allow people to keep in touch with each other, quickly, easily, and without all the other crap.

    So is the bet on?

  3. I predict entire markets rise from the nethers to combat Facebook spam… just like they did for email.

    Where there’s a problem and money to be paid for solving the problem, there are new startups!

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