Part 2 – Facebook Has Had Too Many Facelifts

Ariel Aarenau

Dec 8, 2022 (published February 2, 2023) · 6 min read

The year is 2004: Facebook is “open for popular consumption at Harvard University,” but Zuckerberg is anything but a household name (Wayback Machine, n.d.). The dominant social media platform is Myspace, and this continued to be the case for several years. In fact, by the time 2006 came around, Myspace was the most visited internet site in the United States (Lagorio, 2006). Myspace, which afforded its users a “distinctive Times Square look,” is a description many would apply to the look and feel of most internet applications in the early 2000s (Kirkpatrick, 2011, p. 75). From Friendster to Myspace, there was no absence of flashing graphics, overuse of imagery, and overwhelming visual displays in the design of these platforms. This, at least in part, stemmed from the largely unrestricted ability these platforms gave users to customize their profiles and pages.

While few would describe it this way today, Facebook was once known for its “simple, clean, and uncluttered” look (Kirkpatrick, 2011, p. 11). Zuckerberg, who had a keen interest in “minimalism” and “elegant design,” applied that belief system to Facebook, which, at the time, was quite pioneering (Ibid). Unlike Myspace and other social media sites at the time, Facebook’s interface was far less customizable – a constraint purposely built into the product.

The initial rollout of Facebook was restricted to Harvard undergraduates before it opened to all of the Ivy League schools and, subsequently, all universities and colleges. Facebook initially only allowed users to sign up with a “.edu” email address. Besides the fact that Myspace and others were not limiting who could join, this feature also meant that users had to sign up with their actual identity. The restrictions in who and how users could sign up continued as Facebook opened up to high schools before finally opening the platform to the public in 2006.

2006 also marked the year of the Newsfeed, a content distribution methodology now as ubiquitous as social media itself. Now known as Feed, Facebook created a revolutionary, pervasive approach to organizing and displaying user-generated content. Feed was a core element and large driver in Zuckerberg’s masterplan to “connect the world” (Miller, 2014). With the platform open to the public and a groundbreaking approach to social sharing in place, Zuckerberg only had one element left to secure “total domination” – a jokingly stated goal of the company’s employees according to reporting by David Kirkpatrick (2011, p. 275). Zuckerberg’s final move to reach social media supremacy was turning Facebook into a “social graph.”

Zuckerberg popularized this term at the Facebook F8 conference in 2007 (Kirkpatrick, 2011). Simply put, the social graph represents the social relations between entities, and it became Facebook’s ethos for many years. It is “the interconnections between Facebook users and their friends, their friends of friends, and all their interests and activities” (Robison, 2022). It is the glue — or graph — that made Facebook so powerful (Ibid).

As Facebook added features over the years such as groups, live video, and fundraising, the social graph became what connected users with the content these new features provided. The more people joined Facebook, the larger and more connected the social graph became. The strength of the social graph made Facebook unique, differentiating the platform from its peers. Through its Feed and social graph, Facebook became the place to connect with friends and family, and both publish and consume content you cared about from and for these groups. As the product evolved, the platform allowed users to share content in more diverse ways but seldom in a way that would create clutter in the site’s design. Keeping things “simple” and “clean” was a key tenet of Facebook’s approach and point of differentiation from Myspace and other social media sites at the time. The success of Facebook can be attributed to Zuckerberg’s ability to balance removing constraints with increasing storytelling capabilities, alongside the rise of its unmatched social graph.

Facebook now has close to 3 billion monthly active users (MAUs) – 39.8% of the world’s population (Statista, 2022). As proud as Zuckerberg was to share these numbers in the latest earnings call in October 2022, he did not attribute any of his success to the social graph (Meta Platforms Inc., 2022). In fact, he never uttered those words. Looking back at previous earnings calls, Zuckerberg went from using the term dozens of times to a complete removal of it from his vocabulary. The change in his vernacular points to both changes in user behaviour and preferences, as well as lack of differentiation in Facebook’s model.

The shift from the social graph to AI-generated content (Meta’s current focus) began in 2016 when Instagram reached the milestone of 1 billion MAUs – an achievement, outside of Facebook, that no other traditionally defined North American-focused social media platform had achieved. In a Medium post titled “Rediscovering the Social Graph,” Sameer Singh declared Instagram the new Facebook (2022). In the post, he shared how Instagram has turned into a social graph. In addition to the platforms sharing social graph status, Facebook and Instagram’s offerings are increasingly overlapping. Both platforms largely provide users a way to stay connected with friends and family. As Instagram grew, it removed several constraints that once differentiated photo sharing on its platform from photo sharing on Facebook. The dominant sharing methodology became eerily similar in functionality, and both platforms held social graph status.

Sarah Frier, author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, notes in her book the concern Facebook and its executives had about growth at Instagram coming at the cost of its own platform (2020). It appears that apprehension may have been warranted. In 2021, the number of users on Facebook declined for the first time (Ghaffary, 2022). While the feature and capability overlap seems to be increasing every day, users are beginning to ask themselves why they need both Instagram and Facebook.

Looking at the platforms today, it seems as though Meta is simply copying and pasting the Instagram product press releases and applying them to Facebook. Case in point: both platforms now give users the ability to share Stories and Reels, and Facebook did not even bother giving these once Instagram-based features a different name on its platform. Facebook’s once unique Feed and Timeline features are now ubiquitous with social media. Finally, Facebook’s supremacy in social graphing is now shared with Instagram. Simply put, Facebook lacks differentiated storytelling capabilities and has largely pulled away from the constraints and restrictions that once made it an appealing site to users. The app presently operates as a catch-all service, aiming to service its existing user base by providing them versions of hit features, capabilities, and product extensions that are found in other apps and, consequently, not purpose-built to serve their community. Facebook, which truly was once something special, now adopts everything and offers nothing different or better than its peers.

Ariel Aarenau is in his final year of the Bachelor of Media Production and Design program at Carleton University where he is also minoring in Business. The fusion of digital media, design thinking, and innovative business technologies combines both his strengths and passions. He currently works at Deloitte as a Business Analyst focusing on digital strategy, innovation, and transformation advisory projects. Prior to joining Deloitte, Ariel held roles in Multimedia Services at the House of Commons of Canada, Marketing and Business Development for Deloitte Israel, and the Digitally Assisted Storytelling division of Carleton Immersive Media Studio.

References

Frier, S. (2020). No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. Simon & Schuster.

Ghaffary, S. (2022, February 3). Facebook is shrinking. Vox. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/2/2/22915110/facebook-meta-user-growth-decline-first-time-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg-tiktok-competition-earnings

Kirkpatrick, D. (2011). The Facebook Effect: The inside story of the company that is connecting the world. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Lagorio, C. (2006, July 12). MySpace pulls ahead in Page View Race. CBS News. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/myspace-pulls-ahead-in-page-view-race/

Meta Platforms Inc. (2022, October 26). Meta – Q3 2022 Earnings. Meta Investor Relations. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2022/Q3-2022-Earnings/default.aspx

Miller, J. (2014, February 24). Zuckerberg: Facebook’s mission is to ‘connect the world’. BBC News. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26326844

Robison, K. (2022, October 28). Has Zuckerberg lost faith in his beloved social graph? Fortune. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://fortune.com/2022/10/28/mark-zuckerberg-tiktok-panic-blindingly-obvious-because-of-something-he-wont-say/

Singh, S. (2022, June 22). Rediscovering the social graph. Medium. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://medium.com/@sameer_singh17/rediscovering-the-social-graph-8bd3960988ac

Statista. (2022, August 1). Facebook: Global penetration by region 2022. Statista. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/241552/share-of-global-population-using-facebook-by-region/

Wayback Machine. (n.d.). Web archive – thefacebook.com – 12 Feb 2004. Web Archive – Internet Archive. Retrieved November 10, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.thefacebook.com/

Part 2 – Facebook Has Had Too Many Facelifts

Ariel Aarenau

Dec 8, 2022 (published February 2, 2023) · 6 min read

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