Facebook - In Decline?

As it was with Friendster and MySpace, after every wildly successful period, comes the inevitable decline of a site. Queue Facebook users leaving by the millions. The social network has very little room to grow in a market that is already highly saturated. The question for Facebook executive Mark Zuckerberg is how steep a slide is the hill that Facebook is on, and how it can be halted, rather than improved.

As we can see from the graph above, Facebook has had unprecedented growth in the past few years. Latest statistics tell a different story though, below is a chart of the 10 countries that have lost the most users in the month of January 2013.

It remains to be seen whether this is a mere blip or a trend that will continue. Either way Facebook feels the urgent need to improve their service and to keep competitors at bay, especially after it's disastrous initial public offering last year.

Zuckerberg thusly announced the "Graph Search" service on Facebook in January this year, as the first major product since the company's IPO last May. Zuckerberg described it as Facebook's "third pillar", after the newsfeed and timeline. It allows people to get information on Facebook by acting as a search engine. The function will initially let users search four categories – people, places, photos, interests – and gradually expand to cover all content. Initially it will be a limited rollout, but it is definitely something that aims to compete with Google's search engine. Zuckerberg describing it as something that could be a service all on its own. It encourages users to add more friends more quickly, and if users are active in their social network and expanding it, they will more likely stay active on Facebook.

Graph Search has an interesting premise, and is likely to provide the site with a much needed injection of new content. I believe that it is merely delaying the inevitable, as a company like Facebook can only be successful to a point. This is not to belittle its achievements but people get bored, and even faster now in our fast-paced world, where there are so many things to do. Facebook, enjoy your run while it lasts.