So What Would Happen if Facebook Died?
Isn’t it ironic – a hoax about the death of Facebook going viral!
Reports of its demise of course were premature and unfounded. ‘Users will no longer be able to access their Facebook account from March 15,' claimed website Weekly World News, alongside a supposed quote from Mr. Zuckerberg: “Facebook has gotten out of control and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness.”
What many don’t know is that Weekly World News is something of a spoof website, but that didn’t stop people posting the story, believing it to be real and it spreading across the globe. Some panic ensued – not surprising, as if Facebook did indeed shut down within the next couple of months then a user base of approximately 500 million people worldwide would be affected.
An awful lot of people have invested their time into Facebook and search marketing, and a lot of business have also spent a lot of revenue to advertise themselves across the world’s most popular channel. If Facebook did disappear at a month’s notice, there would be a massive gap to fill, with very few options available to plug in that gap. Could MySpace cope and offer a similar service? Not likely. And Twitter is a totally different advertising medium to Facebook – there are not many services that could make such a large step up, especially after the demise of similar templates such as Bebo.
So it’s understandable that the rumour caught fire in the way that it did, and it’s a testament to just how important Facebook has become to not just the general public, but advertisers too. Which is where Google comes in. A Google take on the social network has long been touted, and they’re realistically the only company with the resources and know-how on how to fill that gap.
Google deny that they are interested in the social market, but if Facebook did indeed vanish then we speculate they would be in there like a shot. The market is too lucrative, and Google would present some interesting ideas on how to tame it, and we'd love to see how they approached the web development aspect of things - if it can improve on Facebook's template at all.
It’s just a shame that it would probably take the death of Facebook for it to actually happen…
