Social networks are over.
This week, Meta murdered the Facebook News Feed, the place billions of people go to connect with friends, family, organizations, and companies.
In its place? A new slot machine of short-form videos + disappearing Stories.
The former News Feed (the name is also disappearing because it's as far away from "news" as you can get) is now a gumbo of topics you ostensibly care about, regardless of who created the videos.
This is the end of consumer social networks, leaving LinkedIn is arguably the sole survivor, albeit on a business-focused island.
Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook enabled people to connect to people based on the "social graph" - real-world relationships, and geographic proximity.
Over two decades, this approach yielded enough eyeballs to make the engines of attention hum....until TikTok.
TikTok doesn't care how or whether you as a viewer are connected to the video creator. TikTok is solely a "discovery engine." It methodically determines what you're into, and serves it up with verve.
The algorithm steadily refines what you see, to extract maximum attention, which is why TikTok users spend 26 hours/month on the platform vs. Facebook users' 16 hours/month.
This 10-hour gap is why Facebook threw in the towel, and is shifting from social graph to discovery engine.
What are the implications for the end of consumer social networking?
- Curate your Facebook friends, pages, and groups. There's a new tab (away from the main feed) where posts from the people you actually know are stashed. These are sorted chronologically - like the old days - so you'll want to be judicious about your connections to make sure you can find the good stuff from Mom.
- Lean into LinkedIn. It is now the easiest/best place to connect with people you actually know.
- Also for businesses, start expanding how you use Messenger. Meta is moving fast to turn Messenger into a full-featured super-app like WeChat, and just rolled out recurring notifications (like an email newsletter, but on Messenger).
Facebook was starting to struggle with stickiness, but to just BAIL OUT on their core business model is astonishing. It's like Ford saying "you know what, let's start doing airplanes instead."
Have you seen the new Facebook feed yet? What do you think? I'd love to know. Just reply and let me know - all go directly to me.