Let's go back in our time machine to the beginning of 2006 and examine the Internet landscape. The buzz-words among the Internet elite were "wisdom of crowds", "user generated content", "crowdsourcing", "democratization of the Internet", "tagging", and so on. Sites that focused on content created, filtered, aggregated, and voted on by its passionate community of users were all the rage: Wikipedia, digg, del.icio.us, flickr, YouTube. What is so great about these sites, is that their volunteer contributors (ie. the geeks) are doing some useful work for the benefit of everyone else (ie. the lazy people).
So what happened?
Jump to today. (Are you back yet? Ok, good) I'm not saying that these popular UGC sites have disappeared, but something has definitely changed. Examine the following Alexa graph:
Digg is suffering, Facebook is flourishing, and I think they're related.
At some point in the last few months more or less, everyone who uses the Internet (ie. everyone in North America 30 and under) got a friend request on Facebook. This innocent auto-generated email originating from your grade 7 classmate spurred a phenomena. A phenomena not that different as to when the Bubonic plague did its viral thing back in 14th century Europe. Through the magic of viral marketing, the ethos of the web community quickly changed.
Facebook is easy and seductive. Why should I edit a Wikipedia page, when I can spy on my grade 9 classmates? Forget tagging an interesting article on del.icio.us, I'm going to tag a photo of my University roommate getting hammered.
Is the web going to hell-in-a-handbasket because of Facebook?
No, MySpace is having some say in the matter as well.
