Death of Facebook?

I sat in a meeting on friday, where I learnt that apparently facebook is on the way out. You didn't know that? me neither we must be as cool as eachother.
I remember Morley urging his loser Australian friends to catch up and get on facebook, whilst bitching (justifyably) about Myspace and how shit it was. Myspace was this decades answer to Geocities webpages, them possessing the same degree of aesthetic design. Busy backgrounds, unreadable fluro text and mindless fucking posts entitled 'hey' and the fact that with over a million billion users of myspace the whole mythos of it producing 'the next big things' I can think of only one example of that actually happening and that is in the meteoric rise of Tyla Tequila who has finally fulfilled her lifelong ambition of getting her own bachelorettesque show with a twist.
But to here that soon facebook will be made obsolete by the spam, which I am a little vague about in nature and will come back to, soon to be replaced by bebo, something called whirlpool? and some Chinese version of facebook.
Which is of course bullshit, it won't be replaced by three things but one.
And at that point I must admit I will not be jumping on the next bandwagon because well fuck it.
Facebook was an investment, uploading photos, tracking down people. Its there now, its done. My social network has more friends on it now than is practicable to maintain in a traditional social context, ie meeting with regularly face to face.
And overall rather than feeling dissapointed to hear these grave predictions of the death of facebook, I am filled merely with skepticism.
Now by no means was the analysis of what is wrong with facebook, myspace and predecessors official or academic but let's go through the warning signs of its impending drop off the internet radar:
1. Spam, I have a hotmail account still that remains my primary hotmail account. I never encountered the spam problem that everyone was complaining about and drove people off it towards gmail and other competitors. But my understanding of spam was that it was those annoying viagra adds, 'investment opportunities' and fake job offers from people you don't know.
Spam as it was described on facebook was all those fucking applications - 'which power ranger are you?' or 'which subway sandwich are you?' quizzes that are forwarded to you constantly by your friends. This 'spam' works on the principle of chainmail, except instead of implying some curse is going to be put on you or that your crush would ask you out if you forwarded it on, instead they merely made it interactive and compulsory to onforward.
But that is as far as the resemblance to 'spam' goes, what the prevelence of this type of application sugests instead (no offence to everyone I know) is that generally speaking people are stupid. People are fucking morons who really are curious and wish to spend their time finding out which power ranger they are rather than going over that marketing proposal or talking to someone in the lunchroom during their lunchbreak.
Furthermore it was compounded by the harbingers of facebook doom I was listening to, that they were overwhelmed with event invitations?? like my mysterious hotmail account I don't really have this problem. The most spammy event invites I get are from the organisation whose marketing meeting I was sitting in, but this is worthy of a second point so lets conclude the spam issue by saying that since the spam in this case is generated and propagated not by dodgy little companies but by the facebook community itself then the real problem with facebook isn't the spam that is pissing of the users but the users that are pissing off the users.
2. Event overwhelmed - I presume that this means that if you are in the right age bracket or no the right people, you are getting sent invites everywhich way for things that aren't actually your friends parties, but more like 'Come down to my KFC store and support me' or 'Socialist Alternative Rally' or 'Garfield Hates Mondays: Live at the Miller's Arms Ballafornia' fucking gigs you never attend.
I recently hosted an event myself with 99 invitees or something which was attended moderately by my former housemates or 5 people. On that scale it seems like the event was a complete social disaster (and for the first hour it was) but seeing as it was an invite to sit around a table at the retreat during what I found out was a sunday before university exams one could not reasonably accuse me of expecting 99 people to turn up.
My invite criteria was 'do I know they are not in the country?' and 'does this person know me well enough that I might hurt their feelings if I didn't invite them?' I would have been stocked with 12-18 people turning up and where the fuck is this going Tohm?
Well the point is that if people are getting overcrowded with invites it is because of the general laziness facebook affords one. Gone are the days where your mother said 'You can only invite 12 people now Tohmmy' and the attendance of those people was practically guarunteed. Also gone are the days were you actually had to post invites to people that you had written the name in yourself because there was no such thing as a mail merge, and you had to pay 45c a stamp.
Yes it costs nothing to invite everyone you "know" to your shitty bands gig or my shitty parties and then hope for a 3% turnout.
There is a term for this new way of inviting people 'social networking' of which websites like facebook and myspace were developed for.
So to conclude again events being categorized into a spam like annoyance that clutters up your facebook profile with shit you don't have time to deal with again is not spam but infact 'social networking'

And hence my skepticism, becuase if the chief design flaws of facebook are users, and social networking applications. Then fuck. A new social networking tool attracting more users daily is not the answer.
Maybe the answer instead is to reduce the functionality, of said websites.
What we are stuck in is a prisoners dilemma that is the size of an economy, maybe not as big as say the carbon emissions vs lifestyle prisoner dilemma, but nevertheless it is one. Because we all like these applications when they are used as intended, just like we all like mobile phones until we get text messages about value bundles from our phone company. But the moment one of us goes 'you know what, I should use my facebook profile to promote this new flavor of gravy I developed' or more likely it becomes an expanded version of LA with desperate hopefuls putting up their photographic portfolios, shitty demo tapes & homemade youtube films they become the hight of annoyance and lower ones expectations of humanity.
Yes I think this is what I remain skeptical about.
So I am going to do something, for all my friends, business associates and mortal enemies. I recommend you pick up this book. Pick it up and fucking read it. Then sit down and think about what it means. What it means is to calm the fuck down and stop printing your resume on purple paper.
Because this book is over 20 years old and we are still committing the same dire errors that they pointed out 20 years ago. AL gore is frustrated about climate change not taking root. I am frustrated that so many people can be embracing 'marketing' without knowing what the fuck its about.
You see you can point out to me the success stories of viral videos on youtube, bands that got big through myspace, parties that were well attended through facebook.
But I can point out to youu bands that made it big by standing on a corner and handing out flyers to their shows (korn) or bands that got a record deal from posting a demo tape to a record producer (regurgitator and probably every other band preceding it) or actors that made it big by being a street performer (Robin Williams).
The success though is very darwinian, of the one or two (billy connelly) street performers that have become millionaire celebrities we all know their are milliones who never make it at all. Of all the bands one can see tonight live in melbourne we seem to be okay with the fact that 2% of them are signed onto record deals.
Yet like the new definition of a child genius (2% of the population + my child) people have adopted the same glassy eye mentality when it comes to viral marketing and social networking sights that I am fucking sick of getting the 'are you fucking crazy' look when I suggest not to bother using these 'marketing channels' and devote our energy to just targeting someone face to face or writing letters or something.
Because we all think 'facebook success stories 0.0000000002% of the jackasses out their + my brilliant idea'
So here is my promise to you. With my shitty/brilliant to be determined projects I intend to get up and running, I am going to go old school with them, these old channels should be markedly uncluttered now anyway (deathproof made the point in the scene where they are discussing a director making a girl an actual mixtape on a cassette tape) rather than lazily, virally 'marketing' by just emailing you all on facebook. It's going to be all opt in, no opt out.