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Jumping the Shark
One of the advantages of being almost 30 is that people less than a decade younger than you tend to think of you as being “wise”. Some of the staff in my local bar will ask me about everything from US politics, the Renaissance, Alan Turing, 1980s TV commercials and arcane facts about the early forms of Parliament. Cultured bunch, the staff in my local.
Last night however, it was my turn to learn. One of them had asked me last week about the phrase “Jumping the Shark” and where it had come from. Last night she told me the very next day after I’d explained it to her, she watched an episode of Scooby Doo (OK, maybe they’re not that cultured) where Scooby jumps a shark and that it had made more sense to her knowing what it was a reference to – it is one of the classic insider jokes within TV comedy. I then had to re-explain it all to the other people assembled. The conversation that followed was… interesting:
| Me: | … so now it’s used to mean anything “past its peak”, including fashions, fads, even websites |
| 1st person: | MySpace has so jumped the shark |
| 2nd person: | Facebook has too. Since those applications came in… |
| 1st person: | Absolutely! |
| 3rd person: | I got one the other day asking “Which member of Nirvana are you?” – there were FOUR members! |
| 2nd person: | I got one asking me “How much would people pay for you?” – what the…? |
It went on in a similar vein for a few more minutes. More examples of the futility of the network, the silliness of the apps. Admittedly, none of them had left Facebook yet, but that might be that it’s rather hard to leave, as GeekUp and Co-working day regular Alan Burlison found out
These are people the social networks need. In their early 20s. University students. Bright, intelligent, aspirational. I have no doubt that within a decade most of them will be in the upper 25% of earners in the UK. Malcolm Gladwell would call them “sneezers” or something – they spread their likes and dislikes around their friends quickly. They set trends.
And in the last couple of months they have come to hate Facebook and MySpace.
Specifically, they hate that these networks have been opened up to people engaging in what is effectively a developed and sophisticated form of spam. They hate that they are being hassled via the social graph into doing “fun” things that are actually about as fun as receiving a hoax virus e-mail. They understand that their time and attention is important and its being wasted by sites that don’t respect that.
I have ideas for applications that will actually add value to the social graph and be of use to people in this group, but by the time I get to roll them out it could be too late – the people that make the platform interesting to me as a recruitment base for customers may have moved onto something else.
Facebook are adding features to improve the user experience as they learn how developers are gaming the system. They might win the battle in time, but ultimately they might have to give more control to users to block invites from apps that are not even remotely in their realm of interest.
This isn’t over yet. 2008 could easily be the year the social networks died.
