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In general, I refrain from assessing candidates, boning up on history, or planning for the future based on polls of the American people.

That’s skating on thin ice. (See my previous blog post about a recent current-events survey.)

Which is why - right about the time Facebook went public - I paid little attention to a poll showing that just under half of Americans think Facebook is a fad.

After all, there was a period when silent film stars believed talking movies might be a flash in the pan. “I think that silent acting is much more difficult than the talking screen acting,” Birth of a Nation star Henry Walthall insisted. “You must put so much into your face and gestures in the silent pictures. In speaking lines, too, you drop all expression. Talking pictures lack effectiveness for that reason.”

And you know how that turned out.

So, when I read about this spring’s Facebook poll - conducted by CNBC and the AP - I thought: meh. Maybe people want the site to be a passing fad, considering how much time it sucks out of their day. But Facebook is addictive, alluring, and, as a researcher told me recently, it allows us to leap over all sorts of barriers.

For example, let’s say you meet a guy. Just once. You’re intrigued. You want to see snapshots of him, know who he’s friends with, and check out what his significant other looks like. In the real world, it would be really creepy to ask for those sorts of pictures right off the bat. And, if you did, your budding friendship would quickly be over.

But on Facebook, you can see anything you want. Significant other? Check. Recent parties? Check. Circle of friends? You betcha.

On Facebook, you can find out who that kid you liked in high school is married to now, even if you would be totally mortified if he or she knew about your sleuthing.

But the very ability of Facebook to entertainingly devour hours of productive time may have fomented a backlash - a notion supported by both anecdotal and statistical evidence.

A number of friends have recently told me that they’ve largely stopped checking Facebook, worried about how central it has become in their lives.

My husband actually deleted 400 friends, even though he was an early adopter of Facebook. When he joined the site in 2004, it was less than six months old.

“I joined because everyone was doing it,” he said. “But now it’s not a helpful social tool because it’s too bloated. I don’t talk to most of the people from high school, for example. So many of the updates are about people I basically don’t know.”

And this week, anecdotal suddenly got backed up by numbers. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 1 in 3 people who use Facebook report spending less time on the site than they did just 6 months ago. Only 1 in 5 say they’re spending more time scrolling through timelines.

The precipitous drop in Facebook’s IPO (down about 30% at one point) has also seemed to undermine the company, making us wonder whether a saturation point has been reached. And whether, one day, when someone mentions Facebook, people will ask: “Isn’t that the site they made a movie about?”

http://boston.com/community/blogs/culture_club/2012/06/facebook_fading.html

Zynga Trouble: Is Facebook Fading As Game Platform?

The Facebook gaming boom appears to be fading.

Market research firm IHS notes in a blog post that after two years of rapid growth the number of people playing games on Facebook leveled off in 2011. As of the end of 2010, about 50% of Facebook’s monthly active users were engaged in games on the site. By the end of 2011, the absolute number was little changed – and the number of active users engaged in games had dropped to 25%.

The post notes that game sector leader Zynga saw a drop in monthly active users in the fourth quartet to 225 million from 266 million one quarter earlier.

“Facebook rocketed to prominence as a gaming platform in 2009 and 2010,” IHS analyst Steve Bailey said in the post. “However, with equal speed, the market then settled into a state of maturity in 2011, with conditions becoming markedly more challenging for game operators. While Facebook remains a worthwhile opportunity for companies able to meet these challenges, the tone of the market in 2012 will be somewhat muted compared to the optimistic outlook of the past few years.”

Bailey offers several reasons for the tougher environment for social gaming:
•It is getting harder to acquire more users. “With more operators vying for attention and user expectations rising, the cost of acquiring users is growing,” he writes. “Viral channels for finding users aren’t as abundant as they were before, so it has become necessary to engage in cross-promotional networks or direct advertising.”
•Users are otherwise engaged. “The second challenge for Facebook gaming is intense competition, which means that user engagement is under pressure. As seen in 2011, there’s been a trend away from the most accessible game genres and toward play styles that require greater player commitment or skill, in return for deeper senses of engagement.”
•Facebook is a “non-specialist” games platform. “As well as competing with other game operators, companies competing in the Facebook environment must jostle for user attention across a landscape of non-gaming functionality. The play styles of social network gaming have evolved in such a manner as can be best slotted in and out of a wide spectrum of priorities for Facebook users.”

The IHS analyst concludes that for social gaming “the honeymoon is over.”

“Undoubtedly, Facebook will remain a powerful player within the gaming landscape, but it’s now part of an emerging multichannel, cross-platform approach to connected gaming,” he writes. “Facebook has implemented multiple minor initiatives to improve the platform for game operators, along with some major ones, such as its mobile-app software development kit (SDK) in late 2011. The social networking site will continue to make improvements throughout 2012, but the aforementioned issues are unlikely to be fully dispelled.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/02/24/zynga-trouble-is-facebook-fading-as-game-platform/

“The top Gov 2.0 tools being used have shifted,” HP and Wakefield said in a news release. “Today, video and multimedia sharing (53 percent) and government-specific social media networks (50 percent) are the most commonly used tools, replacing general social networks and blogs, which were the top picks in the 2010 study.”

Internal networks provided by companies including Yammer have become popular in both government and corporate settings. Popular external social networks for the public include Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

According to the Wakefield survey, fewer of the government IT respondents were accessing the external networks in 2012, in comparison to the 2010 survey. There were 44 percent using external social networks in 2012 vs. 56 percent using those networks in 2010.

Meanwhile, the survey also reported that blogs are dropping in popularity. In 2010, they were being used by 48 percent of the government IT professionals, down to 45 percent in the 2012 study.

Source: FCW (http://s.tt/1abZc)
http://fcw.com/articles/2012/04/24/gov-20-tools-survey.aspx

June 12 2012

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has been a growth machine since it launched for select university students in 2004, growing its user base to nearly 1 billion in eight years, leading many to believe it untouchable. But while Facebook is still king of the social networks, its growth lately has been none too impressive.

Don’t Miss: TOLD YOU SO: Here’s How Facebook Lost the Battle at $28.

The social network’s growth rate in the U.S. has come to a near-dead halt, according to the Wall Street Journal. Unique visitors to the site were up 5 percent to 158 million in April, compared with a year earlier, according to ComScore data. That’s the lowest growth rate since the firm started tracking Facebook in 2008. Also keep in mind, that number is significantly lower than the “total users” Facebook claims, which is over 900 billion — that’s because many Facebook account holders rarely, if ever, log in.

In April 2011, unique visitors grew 24 percent over the year-ago period, and in April 2010, visitors grew 89 percent. Yes, the site is still growing, but at a much smaller pace, which begs the question, When will numbers begin to fall back? It seems only a matter of time — and not much time, at that.

The amount of time users are spending on the site is also slowing, according to WSJ. Users spent an average of six hours on the site in April, up 16 percent from 2011. However, in April 2011, average time spent on the site was up 23 percent over the year earlier, and that figure was up 57 percent over the year earlier in April 2010.

“Declining growth rates are a natural part of the growth cycle,” ComScore analyst Andrew Lipsman told The Wall Street Journal. But until now, there hasn’t been anything “natural” about Facebook’s growth cycle. How else could it have been valued at 100 times earnings when it went public? Clearly many people then still had faith in what they thought was an unstoppable growth machine. But the numbers tell a different story.

Another recent report by Reuters and Ipsos showed that roughly 34 percent of Facebook users spend less time on the site than they did six months ago, saying it had become “boring” or that it was “not useful.” Only 20 percent of respondents said they now spend more time on the social network, while roughly half spend the same amount of time.

Those numbers will certainly make advertisers wary — the site has already been criticized for its less-than-stellar ad model, which had General Motors (NYSE:GM), one of the biggest advertisers in the country, ultimately pull its business just ahead of Facebook’s IPO last month. If Facebook sticks to its ad model, but users begin to decline, then it will really be in a mess.

Shares of Facebook traded up 40 cents today to close at $27.40 per share.

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/facebook-by-numbers-will-the-social-network-crash-and-burn.html/