Facebook Showing Signs Of a Topsy-Turvy Future

Facebook’s ploy to allow advertisers to target the site’s users through personalized marketing tactics might be a drive by the social networking giant “to earn big money,” but there’s a crucial component to site’s planned advertising mechanism that might just inhibit Facebook from getting to that place - the place where it gets mega rich, and where its presumed valuation starts to make a bitty-bit of sense.

That crucial component? Its user base. You know, all the college kids, the college grads, and lots of other people in the glad-to-spend-money demographic. Yeah, that crowd.

It’s a big one. Something like 40 million strong now, is it? 45? Somewhere around there, I imagine. And, on the whole, I don’t think that great big pool of people would be too into the idea of actually befriending advertisers. Which is what Facebook and the list of marketing partners it’s currently assembling are looking to make happen.

So either they’re going to have to force members of the network to do something they most likely don’t want to do, or backtrack on the initiative entirely. To take either route would most definitely affect the company negatively, yet I simply see no other way to parse the issue. Facebook eventually has to choose, and option two is looking a good deal less disastrous than numero uno.

As easy as it is today to admire what’s become of Facebook over the past year or so – what with the massive growth of the platform and the marketplace of applications and widgets that has emerged, literally forming a kind of industry in and of itself – I can’t help but prognosticate the ills bound to incapacitate the company somewhere down the line.

That’s right. Trouble lies ahead for Zuckerberg & Company. I’m not sure when or how the hammer will fall, but fall it will. There’s really just no getting around it. The fact is that Facebook’s putting its hands in too many cookie jars. Plain and simple.

Like was said above, its agenda concerning advertising is woeful. You could say it’s abysmal, even. It was fine when it told of its expanded partnership with Microsoft, but when it started to lay bare its intentions to have advertisers get strangely close to users, the whole picture began to look real creepy, real fast. Creepy-drunk-uncle kind of creepy.

It’s one thing to develop a targeted ad system. It’s another to have Proctor & Gamble trying to become best buds with Bryan from Cincinnati. That simply just shouldn’t happen. It’s unnatural.

Okay, sure, that scenario’s a bit of a stretch. An exaggeration. A dramatization, if you will. But come on, that’s basically the idea. And it’s utterly ridiculous. Who in their right mind would want to even entertain such an experience? Not I. And if I’m guessing correctly, you’re a no-go on the concept as well.

And Facebook’s not stopping at its advertising initiative. It’s still working more items into its system - apps, gadgets, extras, you name it. More utility. More stuff.

Ever get the feeling that it’s all just too much? That it’s all happening too quickly. There’s a palpable sense that there’ll come a time - relatively soon, in fact - that the whole operation will trip over its own shoelaces, lose its bearing, and just fall into disarray. And I have to say, that’s something I definitely see happening. Pretty soon, too.

Not tomorrow, mind you. But soon. Give it a few years, if need be. Eventually, the whole enterprise will start to look dangerously bloated, and so ridiculously multifaceted that it’ll hardly represent its original self. I dare say it’s showing signs of such inflammation already.

Of course, at breaking point, a mass exodus will seem fitting, and if such a fate doesn’t befall Facebook (keep in mind, Zuckerberg could of course be long gone by then), why, then please do call me a fool.

Facebook’s short-term forecast doesn’t look all that bad. But long-term, it looks awfully unpleasant. Time for some re-evaluation by its proprietors if they're looking keep the thing afloat for many years to come, I think.

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