Is Facebook becoming thing of past....

Facebook is still growing towards millions of users, Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year. But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

As for those who have been using Facebook over couple of years now are lesser frequent visitors to the portal against who are just hooking up. And lot of reasons are cited for it......



People have realized more and more that the attraction Facebook carried is diminishing. The experiment that Facebook did years back has been very good and has given many reasons to people to stick to it. However, now the flavor of uniqueness is fading and the sticky session of users hanging out on it is also diminishing. We all know and there are many articles that talk about the disadvantages of Facebook. But thats OK because, people will go the way they want to go, unless they themselves figure out a reason that hurts them and decides to either move out or reduce the usage.

Things that use to go in favor of FB, still holds true but as always in the world of technology - new and more better things keep coming up. Let us do a mining of different factors:

# Facebook is free and it's one of the best medium for communication (chat / image sharing).- The first part is still right, but 2nd not any more. Lot of people (that i know, like me and many more) are hooking up to messaging services like WhatsApp, flickr,instagram which is much more personal and links with the mobile number giving a very high likely hood of being connected and have the flavor of one to one + group! Also, FB Mobile App may not be compatible with all phone due the difference in internet plans but WhatsApp is a humble app that works on any platform with cheapest plan! 

# With Facebook you can connect to any type of people from anywhere in the world because almost every people around the world use Facebook. - Not true any more. Per many papers and series of data published Facebook is seeing many dropouts and are no longer with FB or are active enough to give a reliable communication platform. FB is banned in many places which is also giving though time to the stickiness of users.

# We can share our feelings an what's happening around in our daily life through Facebook. - A complete circle has been made and now more and more people feel its an intrusion and would be staying away from this and will not invite more trouble.....

# Facebook has good privacy setting which gives you the option to customize according to your wish.   - One can only laugh and as things gets more complicated - people don't find it appealing enough to adopt to it.

# Facebook has thousands of application, quiz, games etc which is increasing it's popularity day by. - This is right, but as the "android" and tablet makes inroads to common house hold, not many people need the platform to play games a separate item in their plate. Plus lot of tablet don't support flash which makes it hard to go long.

# Facebook is well designed! There is no fancy color or design available which distracts people. This is an old fact now. In order to push more ads, the real estate of the screen has been compromised and things have been made complicated.

There are a plethora of reasons why we see dip in the usage of FB and increase in the usage of image services, communication services, gaming services - FB still has value which will take time to be replaced but its also not an easy fact to ignore that FB is losing its charm, usage and something new and big could again on the cards.