The past week was an important one in that we might have seen the beginning of the end for the two social network sites Digg and Facebook.
Now it is not a well kept secret that a very small percentage (100?) of Digg (www.digg.com) Digg is updating their algorithm to create more diversity in Digg ranking results the wailing from the Digg community could be heard clear across the country. Digg is renowned for sending massive amounts of one time traffic to a web site. It is traffic that doesn’t click on ads, buy products and rarely returns. If Kevin through this algorithmic update can improve the quality of Digg traffic and posts then everyone will applaud this move. If it doesn’t work, then I believe that the Digg will be surpassed by other user driven content portals like Netscape.
But Digg was not the only site facing troubles last week. A Wall Street Journal article by by Jamin Warrn and Vauhini Vara called “New Facebook Features Have Members in an Uproar” pointed out the new features that Facebook was rolling out:
“Facebook.com, the popular social-networking Web site for students, is suddenly getting the cold shoulder on campus. On Tuesday, in an effort to make it easier for users to keep track of their friends, the fast-growing site rolled out two new features, dubbed News Feed and Mini-Feed. They track users’ actions on the site and then keep all of their friends apprised of those developments..”
As Rishi Kaitan commented on his blog:
“We all know that a big reason why social networks are big is because people enjoy seeing what’s going on in other people’s lives. But there’s a big difference between looking and stalking. The News Feed feature turns social networking into social stalking and that’s just creepy”
Facebook is facing a losing battle with MySpace and this move is not going to help it. In the maturing of any sector, some early leaders fall by the wayside. Web 2.0 is still relatively new, but this week I believe was the beginning of the end for two of the early entrants in the social networking world; Digg and Facebook
