One Possible Reason for Facebook Fatigue

Riffing off of the previous post on Facebook fatigue…

I wonder if the reason 45% of teens in the cited study have “lost interest” in Facebook is partly tied to an inability of enough creative expression…

It seems almost taboo to mention but I’m going to bring up the M-word: MySpace. (And I’m going to speak about it in the past tense although it is still very much alive… it’s just that most people reading this post probably haven’t been there in quite some time.)

One of the things that MySpace was better at than Facebook was that it allowed for tons of creative expression:  You could choose a song that played on your page. You could pick custom backgrounds and colors and imagery. You could attach a blog… MySpace pretty much forced everyone to be creative with their page from the start. And people changed their pages constantly so each time you visited it was different. A new song! A different design!

On Facebook, what changes? Sure you can upload more pictures and share more interesting stuff, but there’s only so much creativity that those actions allow…

An interesting analogy might be to consider your apartment or home… What if you were never allowed to change anything except swap out furniture? Would you eventually get bored? You might. After all, we want to be able to paint walls, plant flowers and change the carpet. Make it ours. (Even if we never do those things at least we could.) In the world of Facebook 400 million people live in identical columns of blue and white.

Facebook is about connecting and sharing. Always has been. And they improve on that idea with every passing day. But if you don’t allow people to really make it their own, eventually, some will tire of it.

Maybe that’s part of the fatigue? I dunno. Just a thought…