I was on the train last night, coming back from a gig at the FreeButt in Brighton, which has to be one of the world’s smallest and grubbiest venues. Anyway, we’re close to home when a conversation at a nearby table got a little heated and someone shouted ‘For f**k’s sake, I thought I’d get at least one journey without someone mentioning Facebook!’
This coming from a table of lads who’d been to a different gig on the other side of town. Now, the oldest was 20 if he was a day, wearing the obligatory crap baseball cap and no doubt sitting with a hand down his pants. Social stereotypes aside, Facebook is now so ingrained in modern culture that even the late-adopters have picked up on it and are getting bored!
This got me thinking: when does an internet phenomenon, a bit like your ‘favourite new band’, go mainstream, become passé and no longer of interest?
Think about it, when was the last time you looked at your MySpace page? Bebo anyone? Do you still check Facebook as much as you did or are you now one of the Twitterati? The sites still did what they did 12 months ago so why the shift in popularity?
The latest social media sites are only as useful as the people who support them. Do they become old hat when they no longer have that sense of exclusivity, or when those who built the tools in the first place start to put restrictions in place and start to turn what was a social media tool into a ‘business model’?
We can already see the cracks appearing on Twitter. It’s already suffering from overload strain and all the talk seems to be about making money out of it. From a gooky little tool to a money machine, next will come the clamp downs stopping us from getting the best from it.
It’s no longer a big deal that Facebook has gone mainstream, but there is already talk that Twitter has gone mainstream, which means Facebook for the masses today, will be Twitter tomorrow, and we’ll have all moved on to something else, something other ‘favourite new app’.
As a final aside, who had the lads been seeing last night? Why it was The Prodigy – one time subversive rebels seen as the cutting-edge, now gone mainstream and playing in some enormo-dome for the masses – sound familiar?
It’s been a busy week in the world of social media. So rather than highlight anything in particular, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the stories that caught my eye.